US election: Joe Kennedy III aims to return political dynasty to Washington – The moment Joe Kennedy III steps into the church hall he is thronged by jubilant elderly women and the ghosts of his family. – by Raf Sanchez, Somerset, Massachusetts – 8:18PM BST 14 Oct 2012

Their spirits appear in different forms – one woman produces a lovingly-preserved photograph of Senator Ted Kennedy in his prime, another offers a half-remembered childhood memory about an early JFK election rally – but they travel with the young congressional candidate everywhere he goes.

“The Kennedys still just means so much to people here,” says Arlene Silvia, a 61-year-old nurse, as she watches Robert Kennedy’s grandson shake hands and laugh off-well intentioned suggestions that he begin running for president.

“And he looks just like them. Well, except for the red hair.”

Mr Kennedy, still only 32, is running for Congress in Massachusetts’s Fourth district and is determined to prove he has more to offer than just his famous name and his striking resemblance to some of the best-known figures in American politics.

“It’s important for me that people understand that I’m running – it’s not my grandfather, it’s not my father it’s not either one of my grandfather’s brothers or or anyone else in my family,” he told the Daily Telegraph at the end of his fourth campaign event of the day.

“It’s my name on the ballot and I have got to go out there and let people know who I am and what I stand for.”

For now he is a largely blank slate that others project onto. The Harvard Law School graduate served briefly in the Peace Corps, a US government programme to send volunteers to developing countries, and worked for only two years as a state prosecutor before announcing his congressional bid, creating little record for voters to judge.

On the trail he is unfailingly polite, to the point of being old-fashioned, and greets voters with the question: “Do you have any advice for me?” But he is also possessed with a quiet confidence in his ideas and his ability to sell them.

At one point he purposefully marches up to a house that with a yard sign professing support for Scott Brown, the state’s Republican senator. “That’s bold,” murmurs one of his staff as they watch him trot up the path. Moments later the candidate returns to report another confirmed Kennedy voter.

The family is also out in support of their newest candidate. Ted Kennedy Jr, the barrel-chested son of the late Massachusetts senator, described his cousin as part of a “new generation” that he hopes will pick up the banner of unashamed liberalism his father carried during a 47-year Senate career.

Standing amid a throng of volunteers, the older man said Mr Kennedy was ready for the “vicious scrutiny” that comes with the family name. “He knows how demanding this life can be but he also knows the good that can come out of it. We’re lucky to have people like Joe,” he said.

Ted Kennedy Jr, son the of the late Massachusetts senator

In between Mr Kennedy and the “Camelot” era of the 1960s, lies a generation of the family wracked by tragedy but also tarnished by scandal and who made a relatively minor mark on American public life. The latest Kennedy candidate is teetotal, famously opting for milk while his university lacrosse team mates would down endless pints of beer.

Sean Bielat, the former US Marine running against Mr Kennedy, is visibly frustrated as he describes his election rival as “a guy with a famous name and no qualifications”.

“A little over two centuries ago Massachusetts fought against this whole hereditary monarchy thing and now some people embrace it,” he said.

Mr Bielat is also scathing about Mr Kennedy’s reluctance to take part in major televised debates, agreeing to a second face-off only after coming under intense political pressure. “You should have to prove the reason people are voting for you, you should have to justify your candidacy and get out and defend it.”

Sean Bielat, the former US Marine running as a Republican in the Fourth District

Lew Flagg, a local Republican activist, puts it even more sharply: “The Kennedys are like a cult around here. I know people who are pro-choice and want low taxes and they will still vote Kennedy just because of the name.”

Whether November 6 will be an election or a coronation in the Fourth District is a matter of debate. Mr Bielat ran hard against Barney Frank, the seat’s current Democrat, in 2010 and this year has benefitted from boundary changes making the constituency marginally more conservative.

However, Mr Kennedy holds an enormous financial advantage, allowing him to afford one-minute television ads – described as “Dr Zhivago-length” for a congressional candidate. And while there have been no recent public polls, the campaign makes clear it believes it is well ahead.

Mr Frank, a hero to Democrats’ liberal wing for his championing of gay rights and financial reform, is loath to offer his potential successor public advice, but warns that the Kennedy name alone will not carry him over the finish line.

“It gets him access. But if he wasn’t able to prove himself beyond that then it could easily backfire,” says Mr Frank, who has represented the district since 1981.

Barney Frank addresses Kennedy volunteers in Massachusetts

For now, the young scion of America’s most famous political dynasty says he will continue going to doorsteps and making clear that he is his own man.

Asked what the best bit of advice he has taken from his family’s archive of campaign wisdom, he replies: “If you don’t know what to do, go knock on a door, go knock on 100 doors. When you’ve finished people might have yelled and screamed at you but you will know what’s on their mind and you will know what you need to do.”

Setting a bad example to the 3rd world nations that dream of forming satrapies out of political seats, passed down from father to son, even expanding into bureaucracy, until one day the Americans will find that all that remains are 50 entrenched Governors and family blocs in all the local enforcement and local state departments to cause corruption and ‘inside jobs’ and unaccountability and opacity no end due to family ties . . . par excellence Monarchs who will later turn on the USA if convenient because nepotism minded people who have no love of their fellow citizens cannot be trusted as goodly allies.

who have no love of their fellow citizens cannot be trusted as goodly allies. Theres your ethical excceptionalism, and opposing the same ethical exceptionalism is MEDIOCRITY of Malaysia’s term limitless, nepotistic WORST who do not gice credit where is due and for love of fundamentalism and hate of minorities, choose to destroy woukd be allies. Can the USA trust people like that, especially when the hudud-phenotype infiltration has proven so serious? Give orders to these idiot 3rd worlders to push for :

It appears that Barack Obama is ready to let Secretary of State Clinton take the fall for the failure in security in Benghazi. During the vice-presidential debate on Thursday it became clear that is what the agenda was.

There is no doubt that is part of her responsibility in that role. According to the State Department’s website:

The Secretary of State, and by extension, the Chief of Mission (COM), are responsible for developing and implementing security policies and programs that provide for the protection of all U.S. Government personnel (including accompanying dependents) on official duty abroad. This mission is executed through the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS). Personal and facility protection are the most critical elements of the DS mission abroad as they directly impact upon the Department’s ability to carry out its foreign policy. With terrorist organizations and coalitions operating across international borders, the threat of terrorism against U.S. interests remains great. Therefore, any U.S. mission overseas can be a target even if identified as being in a low-threat environment.

As a result, DS is more dedicated than ever to its mission of providing a secure living and working environment for our Foreign Service colleagues as they implement foreign policy and promote U.S. interests around the world. Nearly 800 DS special agents serve in regional security offices at over 250 posts worldwide. The DS special agents, also called regional security officers (RSOs) when serving abroad, manage security programs and also provide the first line of defense for our personnel, their families, U.S. diplomatic missions, and national security information. RSOs serve as the primary advisor to the COM on all security matters by developing and implementing security programs that shield U.S. missions and residences overseas from physical and technical attack.

It seems that there is a legitimate reason for the Obama administration to throw Clinton under the bus on this one and it seems that everyone is on board with it, including Vice President Joe Biden. Foreign Policy reports,

Vice President Joseph Biden speaks only for himself and President Barack Obama, and neither man was aware that U.S. officials in Libya had asked the State Department for more security before the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, a top White House official told The Cable.

Biden has come under fire for saying at Thursday night’s debate, “We weren’t told they wanted more security. We did not know they wanted more security there.”

The Cable asked Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications Ben Rhodes whether Biden was speaking for the entire Obama administration, including the State Department, which acknowledged receiving multiple requests for more Libya security in the months before the attacks. Rhodes said that Biden speaks only for himself and the president and neither of them knew about the requests at the time.

The State Department security officials who testified before House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s panel Wednesday never said they had made their requests to the president, Rhodes pointed out. That would be natural because the State Department is responsible for diplomatic security, not the White House, he said. Rhodes also pointed out that the officials were requesting more security in Tripoli, not Benghazi.

But, if you think that Hillary Clinton is going down without a fight, you would be sorely mistaken. Already former President Bill Clinton has stepped in to give his wife some aid in the matter.

Ed Klein at the Daily Caller writes,

My sources tell me that Clinton is working on a strategy that will allow Hillary to avoid having Benghazi become a stain on her political fortunes should she decide to run for president in 2016.

Bill Clinton has even gone so far as to seek legal advice about Hillary’s liability in terms of cables and memos that might be subpoenaed by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which this week launched an investigation into the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The committee will also examine the apparent Obama administration cover-up that followed the Benghazi attack.

Finally, I’m told that Bill is playing with various doomsday scenarios, up to and including the idea that Hillary should consider resigning over the issue if the Obama team tries to use her as a scapegoat. That seems unlikely to happen. But if relations between Obama’s White House and Hillary’s State Department rupture publicly over the growing Benghazi scandal, that could damage the Democratic ticket and dim Obama’s chances for re-election.

Barack Obama has taken some initiative to protect his Attorney General Eric Holder, though it is possibly because of his own involvement in Operation Fast and Furious. It’s quite possible that Clinton is the one that not only knew of the need for extra security for the Libyan ambassador, but that she made the decision to not provide it.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Confidence based on culture of impunity borne of nepotism. Hillary gives the foul ups among bureaucrats a place to hide knowing full well Hillary’s position is virtually untouchable or if Hillary has to take the fall, nothing will effectively happen to Hillary – at most Hillary loses that Secretary of State job, which will do nothing to her very pleasant life (no ill wishes there, just concerned about the USA setting bad examples for the 3rd world) . . .

Will the rest of the Clintons run for office too? Redneck alert! People who do not understand what nepotism and ethics are had better study what is happening in the worst of ASEAN or the Middle East or Africa. Obama should try to forward a bill for Congressmen and Governors to ratify AGAINST nepotism or families controlling entire blocs of the government generation after generation – this is everyone else’s country too and everyone needs to have their turn at the wheel . . .

Obama is the good guy here for ‘throwing Hillary under the bus’ . . . Hillary will not even feel that throw. Too wealthy, too long in power, too well buffered so don’t worry voters! Get in there instead and have yourself a turn as Secretary of State! Other women (also remember men who obviously are qualified) should have a go at being ‘Hillary’, I mean Secretary of State . . . and I don’t mean those related to the Clintons or any other political term limitless junta!

Meanwhile most parts of USA turn into some 3rd world Junta state? The Clintons and Kennedys should know better and act accordingly, the country belongs to everyone not a handful of families where crony capitalism then corruption occurs . . . democratic principles would expect at least this much forethought and consideration for the other American citizens who are qualified and would like to try their hand at running the USA! Not term limitless relatives and family members ad nauseum! Incidental or ‘accidental’ nepotism is no better than direct nepotism! The relatives will always ‘happen to be there’, or will be ‘conveniently experienced’ if no prohibitions are in place! These are aspects of democracy that China and Russia are well versed in that cause them to write laws as above links prevent!

Nepotism (even indirect nepotism), like term limitlessness is low minded, low class, and an insecure behaviour that must be blocked and removed from government to prevent juntas and term limitless oligarchies from forming that corrupt and destroy laws, and prevent participation from regular citizens. USA has term limits for the President but the term limit law does not cover Governorships, Congressmen seats, Majors and Senators (Upper House is SOOOO Tory and Bluecoat as a concept) and effectively prevents the 99% of Americans from participating in democracy if the particular seat holder does not leave for decades or keeps shifting from seat to seat and post to post WITH relatives to boot everywhere else.

Think American voters and get the right minded people who will place prohibitions via term limits on everything even in bureaucracy, INCLUDING prohibitions on immediate relatives or the immediate next generation (more generations the better) from holding those non-peripheral/non-political posts in turn after they have earned their 401K or had 2 terms in any post (i.e. 2 terms then another 2 terms elsewhere, then another 2 term posting, much less decades on any seat is STILL nepotism and undemocratic, destroys 99% participation . . . these are the less obvious satrapies in the US government that are particularly pronounced in many 3rd world countries).

mini-ARTICLE 2.5

The only reason to vote for Romney, but USA had better play nice with ALL other powers if USA wants to tear up the Middle East and become vulnerable to everyone else. To finish the fight that began in Kuwait in the 1990s and implement the below pictured . . .

Most people would love the perks that come with being a star of a hit movie, but Ashley Greene of “Twilight” fame admits in a new interview with Marie Claire magazine that getting the VIP treatment does have a downside.

“‘Twilight’ has ruined me. When this is all over, flying internationally is going to be very hard for me. It is just not worth it to buy a first-class ticket, because of the cost,” Greene said.

With the end of the “Twilight” saga in sight, Ashley, who portrays Alice Cullen, realizes it’s important to be smart about her finances.

“I’m lucky because my dad taught me to be frugal and save. And that’s important because I want to know that I don’t have to take an acting job for two or three years if I don’t want to and that I’ll still be able to make my house and car payments and buy food for my dogs,” she said.

Ashley tells Marie Claire it was “a hard adjustment” when she found herself on the celebrity fast track, especially when it came to talking with friends.

“It was a hard adjustment going from zero to 100 in a day. But it was also hard to talk to [friends], because you don’t want to be a jerk. After the movie [‘Twilight’] came out, some people said, ‘You changed.’ And I said, ‘I haven’t changed, dude,” she said. “Your opinion of me has changed because I’m working on this film.’ Trust me, my parents would let me know.”

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Trust me, my parents would let me know? ‘Lost all street cred’ alert anyone? Ashley’s really uncool to talk like this. A better choice in casting next time? Twilight is for feckless and predatory vampires not ‘my parents would let me know’ types. This sort of mindset type should be on ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ maybe but not ‘Twilight’! Is Hollywood trying to push nepotism obtusely?

Lesley Weir showed colleagues marks on her body
She faces being struck off over her actions at Amerind Grove home in Ashton, Bristol
She bent a colleague over a desk to spank him, the hearing heard

A female care home manager faces being struck off after boasting about ‘unspeakable’ sadomasochistic sex acts to colleagues and flashing her breasts at pensioners.

Lesley Weir also showed colleagues marks on her breasts, buttocks and upper thighs and bent a colleague over a desk to spank him, a hearing was told.

A conduct and competence committee found all but one allegation against the Bupa employee was proved. She was cleared of asking a colleague ‘is she dead yet?’, about a cancer patient.

Lesley Weir faces being struck off after flashing pensioners while managing the Amerind Grove home in Ashton, Bristol

Misconduct: Lesley Weir faces being struck off after flashing pensioners while managing the Amerind Grove home (pictured) in Ashton, Bristol

The Nursing and Midwifery Council must now decide whether her actions while manager between February 2008 and August 2010 at Amerind Grove home in Ashton, Bristol, amounted to misconduct and whether her fitness to practise is impaired.

A former colleague told the hearing: ‘On one occasion, she told me about being abused over a car bonnet in a car park.

‘This was what she wanted to happen. She talked of a number of sexual partners and involved BDSM [Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism], sadomasochistic sex, where Lesley was the slave and her partner was the master.

‘She showed us bruises she got from her sexual activity and was quite open when sat in the reception area.’

Nurse who administered fatal dose of salt to premature baby and posted picture of herself asleep next to his cot on Facebook is found guilty of misconduct

The workmate, who has been granted anonymity by the hearing, said he was scared to report Weir for fear she would lose her temper.

He also told how Weir had spanked him on two separate occasions, including in her office.

Another former colleague said Weir had proudly showed off bruises on her buttocks and breasts, and talked of the ‘unspeakable things’ she liked having done to her.

The hearing also heard how Weir had lifted her skirt to flash a couple of pensioners as they visited a friend admitted at the home.

‘Unspeakable’ sex acts: Weir told a former colleague about the number of sexual partners she had and bondage and sadomasochistic sex (file photo)

Terry Lewis, 76, said he had complained underwear belonging to their friend, a 93-year-old dementia sufferer, had gone missing, to which Weir retorted that he should be ‘on knicker inspection’.

She then told the man he could inspect her underwear first ‘because I’m not wearing any’ before lifting her skirt.

The nurse was sacked from the home after bosses discovered that she had pocketed £900 of rent paid by a nurse who lived in a flat above the home.

Weir stuffed the envelopes of cash into her diary instead of passing them to the home’s accountant and handed the money back when she was discovered in August 2010 claiming she always intended to pay it back.

Weir, who is not attending the central London hearing, wrote to the NMC admitting the majority of charges, but denied flashing her buttocks or asking if the patient was ‘dead yet’.

If the panel find that her fitness to practise is impaired, she could be struck off the nursing register.

Mark Elliott, regional director, Bupa care homes said: ‘Even though no residents were involved, Lesley Weir’s actions were deplorable for someone in a position of such responsibility.

‘We dismissed her in 2010 and referred her to the NMC.’ The hearing continues.

[[[ *** RESPONSE ** ]]]

No need to make Weir jobless. To practice democracy, ask for a vote, after which Weir must not act in this manner again (i.e. make inappropriate quips) and if doing so then will be fired. Scared to report Weir might be demogoguery though. Stuffed the envelopes of cash into her diary instead of passing them to the home’s accountant and handed the money back, means Weir can continue working there on condition that money must not be handled by Weir there anymore and appropriate apologies made to the offended parties. People act out for many reasons, but nursing has nursing’s own brand of guilt ridden people who take up the profession and this should be taken into consideration.

Finding a dress you feel great in and which shows off your best assets is a Godsend, but when you reach a certain age, such a display of your charms seems to attract a backlash of criticism.

Witness the outcry over the sexy gown Carol Vorderman wore to last week’s National Television Awards. While the 51-year-old Loose Women presenter’s Suzanne Neville corseted dress showed off a figure the envy of many women half her age, there was still much muttering that, really, Vorderman should do the maths and cover up. Still, she joins a growing number of older ladies happy to take the plunge on a night out.

Our own columnist Pamela Ballantine often shows off her fabulous embonpoint in glitzy gowns while the gorgeous Tracey Hall wore a daring dress to the recent Belfast Telegraph Woman of the Year awards. We talk to them and others about putting on a bold front.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Flaunting is an attitude not a state of dress or undress. Think nudists and beach goers in bikinis then consider ‘too much’. The attitude and way one moves is actual flaunting. That is how even burkah clad women who’s eyes can’t even be seen can be raped when totally covered. Nudism in this consideration is an exercise of discipline. What is worn or not worn never has anything to do with flaunting. This article is a sign of a very materialist type of society, very unspiritual and visual oriented!

Just the head of the model is shown but the innuendo is the key to sexual content here. Flaunting is the same, not about what one can see, but how one presents anything. (i.e. on background settings : Nudism could be considered pure if thinking along Adam-Eve lines in a forested setting – so leave those ‘naturist ramblers’ alone, but under the neon of the RLD, nudity becomes sexual instead if not burlesque at least.) . . . This posting by the way, is no endorsement of fast food costing more than USD$1 a meal (or in the local currency of the place a fast food outlet appears in – exchange rate considerations are a rip off, especially in the 3rd world (where spiritually polluting/polluted teens flex their ‘muscles’ for all the wrong reasons to the demise of democracy and those on the wrong side of reality . . . much like Inequality/Dhimmutude accepting Ambiga who also got to enjoy ‘buns’ . . . )

Arresting tattoos: A Lothian and Borders police officer with extensive tattoos. He may fall foul of the new guidelines if it spreads to other forces

Police recruits to Britain’s largest force were banned yesterday from having visible tattoos in a sweeping reform of its public image.

Scotland Yard Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe said body art that can be seen by the public ‘damages the professional image’ of the service.

And he ordered a ‘tattoo amnesty’ in which anyone who already has marks on their hands, neck or face must declare them within weeks or be sacked.The ban comes amid increasing concern among senior ranks nationwide over complaints from crime victims that some young officers appear ‘thuggish’.

They are particularly worried about the trend for tattoo ‘sleeves’ in which wrap-around tattoos are inked along the arm.

But rank-and-file representatives claim associating tattoos with criminals is old-fashioned and police should reflect the public they serve.

Don’t discriminate against MEN (or in this case Hindoos or people who believe in the ‘Sampson Theory’). Perhaps a ‘meet halfway’ solution. In low rent districts cops can grow facial hair to match toughness, in toff districts only officers and above are allowed to grow facial hair. What’s the Orwellian state trying to emasculate this time? Even the cops who actually inadvertently or knowingly support the dictators? So cops can’t grow a beard but politicians can? Smackdown time alongside the 99% rather than against you ‘pigs’ . . .

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Rank and file opinions are applicable to a point. There will be suitable ‘tough’ districts for tattooed constables but in the ‘toffier’ ones, tattoos should be forbidden. Perhaps UNIFORM ‘police’ tattoos could be allowed, or even the uniforms in ‘rough’ districts could feature sleeveless or allow jeans or ‘ripped’ trousers specifically to convey a sense of ‘tough”. Those police helmets too are actually laughable in such districts and could be replaced with simple (backwards turned? caps). Cops decked out in ‘beefeater/colonial’ only grate on the chav sensitivities of ‘low life’ in such districts and make cops look and feel stupid, lowers respect from the ‘ghetto dwellers’.

Might as well outfit the cops in lace doilies and furbelows carrying the Royal banner . . . the low lifes would just want to egg them instead (which in fact work retrogressively to distract by entertaining the ‘lowlife’ who might be doing worse crime). Heck even posting about royalty then later subcultural memes in a certain 3rd world country had an entire state in a certain 3rd world area up in arms against a certain individual who had dressed down for decades to fit in with the local trash whom I won’t mention . . . incongruity is a factor that makes the police not fit in here. Spiffy uniforms in a gaggle of the obnoxiously loudly branded toting rag wearing dregs of society, might be better off as plainclothes posing as the regular ‘low life’ instead who will doubtless be reognized in time but can still be effective even if out of uniform. Uniforms forster ‘us vs. them’ culture that destroys low wealth to police camaraderie.

Probably there will be many less disciplined cops ‘wanting’ to be posted to tough districts out of sheer desire for lack of discipline, but the toughest districts in fact should have the most disciplined officers sent there instead! If rank-and-file representatives claim associating tattoos with criminals is old-fashioned and police should reflect the public they serve, then the above suggestion should be applied. Tattoos allowed but only in tough districts! Helmets and full uniform, with no tattoos in ‘tough’ districts!

Body art that can be seen by the public (also facial hair, tattoos, ‘kinked’ uniforms and piercings – approachable conversational pieces) helps the professional image’ of the police, but only in tough districts.

BEIJING, Oct. 22 (Xinhua) — The State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) on Monday called on local authorities to “resolutely ban” any acts of profiteering related to religious activity.

The administration also told government departments not to allow or support any contract operation, equity investment or joint investment conducted by enterprises or individuals at religious sites.

The SARA said in a statement issued jointly with nine other authorities on Monday that some local governments, enterprises and individuals have made religion a profitable instrument by building new religious sites for profit, hiring fake monks or clergy to conduct illegal religious activities and collect religious endowments, as well as tricking or forcing visitors to surrender their money.

Moreover, some companies have invested in popular religious sites and categorized them as listed assets, the statement said.

Such practices have disturbed the order of religious activity, impaired the interests and image of the religious circle, hurt the feelings of believers and violated the rights of other visitors, the statement said.

The authorities vowed serious punishment for government officials who are found to be involved in such practices.

Religious affairs should be administered exclusively by their respective circles under the supervision of relevant government departments, the statement said.

The authorities also asked for a thorough check of the country’s registered religious venues to eliminate violations.

No organization or site other than legally registered ones are allowed to organize or hold religious activities or to accept religious endowments, the statement said.

Furthermore, the statement said all clergy should be qualified by relevant religious organizations and register at administrative organs for religious affairs at the county level or above.

The statement also called for tourism enterprises and tourist guides to avoid recommending for-profit worship sites.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Bureaucrats are no supposed to be doing business either in GLC or Private, much less religious profiteering. This way separation of powers is assured and that the state will not become a Theocracy as the Dalai Lama intends for Tibet. Real religion is about discipline and fasting and seriousness of life, the pain of life, the contemplation of death, the problems of the world and failings of society or law – NOT profit. The state meanwhile though should ensure that the minimum housing and food are at least assured for ALL people, so that the criminal minded do not turn to using religion as a tool to ‘work the system’ by in collusion with bureaucrats (who already have an ‘Iron Rice Bowl’) especiallym or the lazy congregate as ‘minks’ simply out of having no choice in life because the unsused state land is sequestered and unrealeased/prohibited by state or because all jobs are held by the relatives of cronies and term limitless politicians who are insanely wealthy while the 99% don’t even have homes and have no right to access mineral, plantation or oil wealth for example which are owned by a handful of nepotistic and term limitless and generational political families – feudal satrapy style par excellence Oligarchy-form monarchs.

As for the Tibetan ‘way of discussion’ which monks display, those featured on various documentaries are probably having a very low level discussion? When one is in truly deep issues (which looks impossible under the conditions in the pictures), one has no time to pose, twirl and slap or what not, much less with broad smiles.

If religion is propaganda in any way, this profane, almost loutish attitude, in what are supposed religious discussions appear to be exceptionally lighthearted. And besides the most meaningful discussions occur WITHIN contemplation ALONE, not without with distracting persons whom which greater insight cannot be obtained. Monks are silent excepting when giving sermons, because they obtain the truth from contemplation with the ether/Akhasic (not talking to people around them) then transmit to the world. This is not religion, this is posturing and posing to catch the attention of the young. Young people CANNOT be religious workers or in the order unless they make a conscious choice when adult and only after experiencing enough of the world’s stupidity and mental illness first hand. State religion is enforced, and this Bon Sect looks ‘popularised’ and a crony industry, a ‘Theocrat-Building Contractor-CapitalisCronyBureaucrat Complex’ if anything.

‘Back’ button habit. Also when ‘back’ is used, the more obtrusive sites tend to flash ads (like this one) or require the reader to press ‘back’ a few times. One may consider buying, but might be looking for a list of places where the ‘netbook stick’ can be bought directly rather than online. The ‘re-enter Email Address’ feels quite ‘demanding’ and obtrusive, but perhaps this is to ensure bots do not proliferate and sabotage Net Zero. As for the ‘SUBMIT’ button, note that there is an NLP propaganda war/wave on internet and MSM . . . HEREON being prevented from replying because of ‘lack of space’, we will continue below . . . the lack of response space was offensive and caused me to not post this comment.

However I find a free NetZero service very appealing, so Netzero will still get to hear from me. Finally consumers prefer UNLIMITED space to respond when responses are asked for and should not be limited to any number of words. Which effectively signals a cut off of the user in mid response (or mid sentence).

This form though is a failure and I would like Netzero instead to read the below link :

* I note that there is an NLP propaganda wave * . . . that the internet has been manipulatively inculating a sense of Orwellian psychological manipulation towards obeisance. To not be accused of indulging this offensive behaviour, the use of words must be chosen carefully. To use the word SUBMIT, indicates an intent to dominate subconsciously if not consciosuly via NLP. Instead use neutral words like RESPOND.

The above feedback IMHO is highly value added and I would like for NetZero to take ito account and change accordingly to even better NetZeros offer of 0.00 for services. I would advise an interim service as well called Minimum. the gradation from 200 to 500 seems presumptuous and indicates server space.

I would however guess that there is no coverage in ASIA and would like to ask how much a partner might have to contribute to create a server hub in ASEAN. Also, I found the lack of email address to type a response to rather irritating. As with various websites that somehow refuse to list their official email address, I decided to whois NetZero.net and came up with the below address that this email will be sent to. I hope this posting was helpful.

Paul John was named the first Caucasian Shaman today by Elder Shaman Iterakat IVX in a ceremony held in The Holy Tribal Circle. Some 80,000 people came to the open-air ceremony as the 17th century Mohawk-Algonquin woman and six others were canonized.

“It’s so nice to see the Sky-Father showing all the flavors of the world,” Cene Galdwell, a Native American member of the Menominee reservation in Elderpeak, Wis., who attended with his wife, told the Associated Press. “The Anglo-Saxons are enthralled.” The canonization ceremony happened at the same time the world’s Elder Shamans descended on the Tribal Council to discuss ways to revive faith in parts of the world where it is falling by the wayside.

Among some of the select faithful who were chosen to receive communion from the Chief Shaman was Eakf Binkjfeather. The Washington boy was near death for months with a flesh eating bacteria, but made a miraculous recovery that the Tribal Council credited to Tekakwitha. The Tribal Council said it believes that the prayers Eakf Binkjfeather’s family directed to Tekakwitha were responsible for bringing the boy back from the brink of death.

Eakf Binkjfeather cut his lip during the last minute of a Boys & Girls Club Atl-atl game in 2006.

“I was running down court with the ball, I stopped in front of the hoop to shoot when I was pushed from behind,” Eakf wrote on his website. “I flew forward and hit my mouth on the base of the portable basketball hoop.”

Two days later, he wrote, he was in the hospital with a strep bacteria infection that had spread across his face, head and chest.

“It’s a bacteria that can cause severe infections in unusual circumstances but most of us don’t ever have any problems with it,” said Dr. Christopher Ohl, a doctor at Skeep Forest Shaman Medical. “But if all of the circumstances come together and the setting is just right, it can get in through the skin and cause a severe infection.”

Ohl said the chance of survival for people with the bacteria is roughly 50-50. At the urging of the family’s priest, the Binkjfeathers began praying to Tekakwitha, who converted to native Native Ameri-Indian Shamanism when she was 18 and became a fervent follower. Her face was scarred by smallpox as a child, but it is claimed that the scars disappeared after she died in 1680 at the age of 24.

ARTICLE 11

Großpriester (Germanic Elder) of the Neo-Pagan Order of Baldr, to name first Charlemagnean saint of Baldr. – October 21st, 2012 – 02:07 AM ET

Sunday is a big day for Germanians. Großpriester Alois I, will name 17th century French general Napoleaon Nonaparte the first Charlemagnean saint of Baldr.

Another newly named saint is Annamarie Poce, a German-born woman who emigrated to the Catalans as a child, became a nun and went on to devote 30 years of her life helping lepers in England.

Their canonization, along with those of seven other saints, will be celebrated at a special Mass in Berlin’s CapSquare Sunday morning.

Frigg lived to regret skipping the mistletoe. Her son now dwelt in the shadowy realm ruled by Loki’s daughter, Hel. And when the corpselike queen agreed that Baldr would revive if the entire world wept for him, a single holdout prevented the light god’s return. Moral of the story: mistletoe is for mischief, so skip the smooching. Mistletoe is deadly, not romantic. In fact, the plant is parasitic and poisonous, and its name may derive from the German for “dung branch.” This year, find proper uses for mistletoe – like binding your enemies, playing tug-of-war across a volcano, or weaving Viking-shaped lawn ornaments. Don’t kiss under/near it.

For certain the Christians have a repository of wisdom but much of that that wisdom is inaccurate, skewed, corrupted and even harmful. The true ‘Capital’ of Christianity is at Aramea NOT Rome, and Aramea lies in the north-west of modern Iran or the north-west of Persia (which was not Muslim and Zoroastrian instead . . . ). Rome was incidentally a stronghold of planetary-archon worship and NOT Monotheist micro-state, but instead a center of a massiveEmpire, saddening to see Rome being captive to Christians while neglecting the heart of Christianity at Aramea! Aramean is the true language of Christianity and not Italian, much like Arabic for Islam, and Hebrew for Judaism. What say Pope Benedict to the above facts? Could the ethnic Italian Pope have been living a lie all his life?

(Getty Images)Got an extra ten bucks? If so, you, too, could be the owner of a sparkling new home in Reston, Manitoba, a rural prairie town in Southern Manitoba bordering Saskatchewan on the west and North Dakota on the south.

In an effort to jump on the oil boom in that part of the country, officials are once again selling undeveloped land for a mere $10, an initiative they first started in 2010. Back then they had 14 lots for sale, 11 of which have houses built on them today, economic development officer Tanis Chalmers told ABC News .

That plan was so successful that in September the Rural Municipality of Pipestone, of which Reston is the biggest town (population: 550), decided to put up an additional 10 lots for sale, along with the three left from 2010. Nine remain, “But I’ve had offers on them already from both Canada and the U.S,” said Chalmers, adding that the initiative has been so effective that the local school finally “has a standalone kindergarten class.”

Agriculture and oil are the main industries in the town, which was founded as a railway point for the Canadian Pacific Railway, but Chalmers says she hopes to attract small business, too. “We need to have supporting services to support the people living here and coming,” she said. “We’d like to see a new hotel here, a new restaurant, a bar.”

The plan is pretty straightforward: To purchase a property, wannabe homeowners have to sign an agreement and put down a $1,000 deposit. Once a lot is purchased, owners have 90 days to begin construction, and 12 months to complete it. As soon as the town receives your occupancy permit, they will refund $990 of the original down payment.

“You don’t have to live here full time, but you do need to put up a permanent structure,” said Chalmers.

As further incentive, the town is offering a $6,000 grant to people who’ve built a new house or purchased an existing home in the rural municipality. The grant, mind you, can be used for anything from home upgrades to a new car. Chalmers says taxes hover around $1,500 to $2,500 per year.

Todd Vanloo, who recently moved to Reston, told CTV that he was lured by the offer.

“We couldn’t pass up this opportunity of a house of this nature for this kind of money, and a lot for $10,” he said.

Commentator Commentaries :

@The Bunker Buster said :

. . . taxes hover around $1,500 to $2,500 per year…..They get you there..

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Even the hideous bank fees cost more in the USA than this $10 land. Who needs to tolerate foreclosures? As for taxes, actually, all 66.6% of the 99% people need to do is to vote for MPs who will remove those for properties worth 50K and below or an MP who will allow Allodial Titles which means NO TAXES after paying the single tax (which saves alot of administration and crony jobs for unecessary work as well). End of issue. Finally any court of law can easily understand that a property should not be taxable more than the value at which the property was last sold at. In the 1700s a few 10s of acres of land could be bought with a few silver dollars.

How could taxes be more than what the entire land was bought at originally? A country could in fact reward people for not moving around and creating organic communities as well as keep inflation down and development spread out. if people keep selling and packing up, we end up with over-priced over dense regions that are unliveable. More profiteering paradigms by which puppet masters no less. So vote on a MP for Allodial title criteria or taxes that do not exceed earnings or basic value. $2500 taxes when a property is worth $10? Ridiculous and unconstitutional! Perhaps 0.10 or 10 cents would be more fair but think, within 100 years the woner would have paid 100% in value AGAIN. Whats the point? Might as well go for allodial Titles and be done with the wasted paperwork, crony bureaucrat job and NEVER PAY PROPERTY TAX AGAIN. That’s a 30 year all paid at once, 1-off tax I believe, from what I remember.

So we will instead have people saving up over the years (no foreclosures for the non-profitable, the idea of a nation is not to run people off their land and homes for foreclosures), to pay single lump sums to end the paperwork FOREVER via Allodial Titles. Whats with all the lawyers? Never apply what you learn or just colluding to oppress and bleed the people and keep the crony bureaucrat system in place as well as waste peoples’ time running up and down the tax office paying taxes year after year at unfair levels? Vote for an MP that will forward and ratify Allodial Titles under penalty of vacating the political seat via Statuary Declaration! Think 99% ters and votre under such criterion!

With her bleached eyebrows and ultra long black fingernails, Kelly Osbourne looks like she belongs in another world in a new set of striking photographs.

The 27-year-old star shows off her svelte figure in the Gothic-style seaside shoot for the autumn issue of Fault magazine, where she sports a floor-length black dress with lace detail.

Another photograph shows the star’s pale purple hair coiffed into an old fashioned front roll as she poses with black gloves and a high necked black top.

Gothic glamour: Kelly Osbourne shows off bleached eyebrows and black extended fingernails as she poses in black lace for a new magazine shoot for Fault magazine

Kelly tells the magazine in an accompanying interview that she was also initially thrown by her dramatic transformation, and was bemused at making headlines for her newly pale brows.

‘You know I’ve never done something so small that made world news, it actually blows my mind that that happened,’ she tells Fault. ‘I was having a laugh about it every time I looked in the mirror. I thought to myself, “I really do look like an Alien.”‘

The Fashion Police presenter admits to the publication that her goal is to be an individual when it comes to style.

‘I don’t want to look like anyone else,’ she says. ‘I want to be me rather than someone I’m supposed to be.’

A striking sight: Kelly told the magazine she felt her bleached eyebrows made her look like ‘an alien’

She advises readers to: ‘Try everything once – that’s what life is all about. That and making mistakes. You can always change things, i.e: my eyebrows!’

Growing up in a rock and roll environment with father Ozzy Osbourne and extroverted mother Sharon influenced Kelly’s style too.

‘This may sound like a cliché but rock and roll is all I know… knew,’ she says. ‘It’s not like my dad was a lawyer or had a typical 9-5 career. So there was no traditional normality.

‘My mom having such a love of fashion played a huge part, she loves theatre and older movies, so [Marilyn] Monroe and [Audrey] Hepburn were a big influence. Also, a lot of my earlier hair styles where directly taken from a book my mom had on Vidal Sassoon. I think I tried every cut in that book…

Get the full shoot and interview, exclusively in FAULT Issue #12 which will officially be released on October 15th and is available for pre-order now from fault-magazine.com/issues.

Curl up: Kelly’s purple hair is dramatically preened into a front curl as she poses in a dramatic high neck black top and gloves in the beach shoot

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

‘I was having a laugh about it every time I looked in the mirror. I thought to myself, “I really do look like an Alien.”‘

Alien?!? Thats it, Kelly’s off my ‘real goth’ list even if Kelly looks the makeup or clothing part (nice props!).

A real Goth does not feel alien. Nor is goth mainly about fingernails and accessories and dresses. Goth is about death and the glory of darkness, also the cool tones and cadences of lamenti for each relevant culture. Hanging around graveyards (preferably of the last generation of goths – perky spirits get them down, no daylight living commoners please . . . ). A real goth feels ‘dark’ or undead at most, preferably vampiric. Shadowy if possible, though not hellish or infernal. Or weepy and depressed for the beta-goths. The use of the word ‘Alien’ sets Kelly as one of the non-goths if anything. As for laughter, at least Alpha Goths DO NOT, at least for normal stuff.

The world is rubbish and Goths ‘keep things real’ by ‘sincere darkness’ as a barometer. The day goth subculture dies out as a mainstream meme, is when all world problems are solved. That includes the issue of high density graveyards, lack of 24 hour venues, or worse, high rise style high density columbariums and the lack of quality mausoleums, the small scale and unmazelike quality of tombs, and the lack of necropoli of any respectable size . . .

The movie ‘Alien’ incidentally is more ‘dark industrial’ which is more cyberpunk with a very heavy dose of orwell and high tech, not really gothic, as sci-fi is not ‘Dark Ages’ where everything was low tech but magic was more common though not over-proliferated . . . thanks for reminding anyway Kelly. That last Space Field pic will be posted tomorrow I think, I really hope someone takes up the threadbare programming offer! Probably some programmer from the 3rd world simply because the USA’s programmers are too expensive to hire due to cost of living there!

ARTICLE 14

Egypt top court to rule on constitution – 10-26-2012 13:01 BJT

The legal row over the writing of Egypt’s new constitution is being referred to the country’s supreme court. The court will begin investigating the case within 45 days.

A delay that many see as a blow to the country’s liberal politicians. The parliament’s Islamist majority now has more time to finalize the draft constitution.

The fate of Egypt’s political charter, the constitution, remained uncertain amid a court ruling to refer the case to the highest court in Egypt.

The court declined to rule on the legality of the constituent assembly drafting Egypt’s Constitution.

The supreme court will begin investigating the case within 45 days allowing the Islamists time to finalize the constitution draft.

Khaled Aly, former presidential candidate, says, “The court will refer to the highest constitutional court to review if the president is authorized to issue a legislation. That legislation was approved by the people’s assembly which was dissolved.

And the law was passed a month after the dissolution. Hence we have a constitutional problem. Is it within the authority of the president to issue this legislation to have the assembly or not?”

Maged Attia, lawyer, says, “I never expected that the court would refer the lawsuit to the constitutional court. They should have either given a verdict of dissolution of the assembly or leave it. With this decision they are holding the stick from the middle.”

The delay in the ruling is a possible blow to liberals.They are against the current assembly, since according to them, it is not representative of the Egyptian society.

Their main concern is the creation of an Islamist instead of a civilian state.Islamists on the other hand argue that this was to be expected given their numerical superiority in Parliament and the election of an Islamist president.

Hamdy El Fakharany, former member of parliament, says, “We are against the Brotherhoods’ constitution. We will not accept that the labors and farmers don’t have rights in the constitution; We will not accept them stealing away the revolution and killing our freedom.”

The assembly has been trying to complete a final draft before the court rules on its dissolution.

The charter must be put to a public vote within one month of the assembly’s approving of the final draft.According to legal experts, once the people vote for the new charter, no court can rule against the decision.

Faced with an uncertain political charter and turbulence that preceded the removal of Mubarak from office, the battle for supremacy between the Liberals and the Islamists promises to be the new front for a protracted wrangle that may as well through the quest for a new constitution into serious doubt.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

How about some ‘terrorists’ scuttle this Islamist agenda in what should be one of the greatest civilisations and most striking and well loved Polytheistic faiths ever in the history of mankind. USA asleep on the job? Where are those contractors USA is known for? Freemasons having nice meals and flying around talking rubbish at the UN while the Islamists take over their territories? Israel, the Priesthood of Egypt, had better prime Mossad or call the CIA or something. Get that Pharoanate up and running, put your foot down REAL Masons! Remember though that Egypt will be able to claim authority over the entirity of the West’s Freemasonry and prepare to be secondary to a pure blood (less than blonde haired, non-blue eyed Pharoah . . . ). Make the right choice Westerners and Egyptians. In Islam Egypt can only be periphery, but in Freemansonry under a Pharoanate, the West comes under Egyptian control!

China’s Bo stripped of last title; prosecution next – Once considered a top contender for the Politburo, Bo Xilai was stripped of his legislative membership – October 26, 2012 (CNN)

Beijing (CNN) — Chinese authorities have stripped disgraced former leader Bo Xilai of his legislative membership, his last official title, paving the way for criminal prosecution of a once rising political star whose spectacular fall has thrown the ruling Communist Party into its biggest crisis in decades.

The People’s Congress of Chongqing, a southwestern metropolis governed by Bo until early this year, has removed his national delegate status, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported Friday.

The announcement comes ahead of the 18th Party Congress in Beijing next month that will set out who will occupy the top positions in the party hierarchy, part of a once-in-decade leadership transition.

Bo was expelled from the Communist Party and the government last month, after being stripped of leadership positions in April.

He once was considered a top contender for the Politburo Standing Committee, the team of nine politicians who effectively rule China, but the news report on his expulsion last month, based on a party investigation, painted a portrait of corruption, abuse of power and improper sexual relationships.

Investigators determined that his behavior tarnished the party’s reputation, Xinhua reported, and discovered “clues to his suspected involvement in other crimes.” The party investigators have sent their conclusions to judicial authorities.

The report said Bo made “severe mistakes” related to the killing of a British businessman — a crime for which his wife was imprisoned — and a diplomatic incident involving his former police chief in Chongqing, Xinhua said.

It also cited influence peddling, bribery and womanizing as details found in the course of the party’s investigation.

Bo is a charismatic, albeit controversial, politician who launched a “smashing black, singing red” campaign in the southwestern city of Chongqing that promoted Communist ideology and zealously cracked down on organized crime.

His economic programs, which included millions spent on social welfare, made him a popular leader in Chongqing. But analysts say his populist policies and high-profile personal style were seen as a challenge to the more economically liberal and reform-oriented faction that dominates the current party leadership.

Bo’s fortunes changed when the dramatic scandal involving him and his inner circle began to seep into the public realm. His wife, Gu Kailai, and family aide Zhang Xiaojun were arrested in early April, suspected of poisoning British businessman Neil Heywood.

Heywood died in November in Chongqing, where Bo was the Communist Party chief. His death was originally blamed on excessive alcohol consumption.

Bo was soon stripped of his top posts for “serious breach of discipline.” In August, his wife received a suspended death sentence after a seven-hour trial. Days later, four senior Chongqing police officers were also sentenced to jail for covering up the murder.

Wang Lijun, the former police chief of Chongqing, set off the Bo story on February 6, when he fled to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu and told American diplomats that Gu was a suspected accomplice in a murder case.

After his request for asylum was turned down, Wang left the consulate and was taken away by Chinese officials. But his accusations rocked the world’s most populous nation.

Wang was sentenced to 15 years in prison last month for defection, coverup, bribe taking and abuse of power.

The party expelled Bo after an investigation of the killing and Wang’s visit to the consulate, a trip made “without permission,” Xinhua said.

The investigators said Bo “bore major responsibility” in the Wang incident and the killing, Xinhua reported.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

2 terms in power, then no more repostings to parallel departments. All who have stayed on too long need to be replaced as well. This should not apply to PM or Presidents’ posts, but every single post in the bureaucracy ESPECIALLY the very top posts. So the next time a person is promoted to the top post, they should know that their time is up and retirement will soon follow. Probably those lobbying for top posts should be doing so as an end of career move, or department shakedown kind of move if lobbying for a post. People who know their power is temporary will never dare to murder in this manner. Term limitlessness and nepotism breeds such murderers and abusers or invites murder and abuse. See the link below for an example.

ARTICLE 16

Philippine politicians get bulletproof cars – 10-25-2012 15:23 BJT

There’s a full six months to go before the Philippines holds a midterm election but already politicians are gearing up for the debate. And amid political instability and unrest in some parts of the country, part of their preparation is bulletproofing their cars. Barnaby Lo explains how next year’s vote is good for the armored car business.

You’ll probably never be able guess what the model or make of this vehicle is or why anyone would have his car stripped down like this. But there are over a dozen SUV’s lined up here all waiting to be retrofitted.

“Our clients come to us for security and peace of mind.”

For over ten years now, Ryan and his men have been in the business of armoring vehicles. From dismantling the different parts of the vehicle to cutting the steel and installing bulletproof materials to upgrading the car’s suspension and then carefully trimming upholstery to make everything fit back together, Ryan says bulletproofing a car is an art.

Ryan Saluta, Sales Manager, Exo Armoring Co. said, “Most of our employees are actually welders and not mechanics because we cut a lot of steel so we have to be very precise.”

Barnaby Lo, Manila said, “Most of their clients here are wealthy businessmen who need protection from criminals. But during an election year, there’s a completely different set of clients who need a different kind of protection, that come here to have their vehicles armored.”

With just over 6 months left before midterm election, there’s increasing demand from politicians especially from the country’s restive regions in the North and South, where violence has become a staple of every election.

Bobby Tuazon, People Empowerment in Governance said, “They come face to face against each other. The private armed groups of competing politicians confront each other. And therefore the climate of violence is always there.”

In 2009, 58 people were killed in broad daylight while on their way to file for a local politician’s candidacy for governor of the Southern province of Maguindanao. The perpetrators were allegedly from a rival political clan. It was the country’s worst incident of election-related violence.

Three years have passed, but no one has been brought to justice. No surprise then, that for some candidates vying for local posts in next year’s election, it’s worth spending as much as $80,000 to have one vehicle armored, if only to ensure their survival.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Intending to be term limitless eh? If term limits are applied, killing a politician would not be worth the trouble, but looks like either Pinoy MPs are intending to be dictators and nepotists or Pinoy citizens are getting more lawless if not unable to impose term limits on MPs to make MPs think they need bullet proof vehicles . . . IEDs and Grenades can get through any overpriced bulletproof car armour. Which of the 99% of Pinoys said the politicians were allowed to get such expensive vehicles? How about this. If politicians only stay for 2 terms, the Pinoy people promise that no killings will be done, so no bulletproof vehicles off the people’s tax monies will be needed for such waste and implied false sense of privilege based around people killing such MPs. 3rd world mindedness no end . . .

Community of 50 men, 50 women and 70 children from Guarani-kaiowa tribe are camped inside a ranch in Brazil’s southern state of Mato Grosso do Sul
Indians claim land has been the graveyard of their ancestors for centuries
Spokesman said they would rather die on the land than be made to leave

A entire tribe of 170 Indians have vowed to commit mass suicide after a court in Brazil ruled they must leave what they believe is sacred land, it was reported today.

The community of 50 men, 50 women and 70 children from the Guarani-kaiowa tribe are camped inside a ranch in Brazil’s southern state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

The Indians claim the land has been the graveyard of their ancestors for centuries, according to Brazil’s Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI).

Protest: An ethnic Guarani-Kaiowa Brazilian Indian from the state of Mato Grosso do Sul fixes a cross into the lawn at the Esplanade of Ministries in Brasilia yesterday. His entire tribe of 170 Indians have vowed to commit mass suicide after a court ruled they must leave what they believe is sacred land

A Guarani Indian family ride a horse-drawn cart in southern Brazil in 2004. The Indians claim the disputed land has been the graveyard of their ancestors for centuries

But this week, Judge Henrique Bonachela upheld a petition made by the ranch’s owner to have the tribe evicted from the land.

He decreed a fine of £150 for every day the tribe remains on the land, on the banks of Brazil’s Joguico River.

A spokesman for the tribe today said they do not intend to fight the judge’s decision but would rather die on the land than be made to leave.

And in a letter the tribe called on the Brazilian government to respect their wishes to be buried there along with their ancestors.

It read: ‘Because of this historic fact, we would prefer to die and be buried together with our ancestors right here where we are now.

‘We ask, one time for all, for the government to decree our extinction as a tribe, and to send tractors to dig a big hole and there to throw our dead bodies.

‘We have all decided that we will not leave this place, neither alive nor dead.’

Battle: A spokesman for the tribe said they do not intend to fight the judge’s decision but would rather die on the land than be made to leave

Remote: The tribe is camped inside a ranch in Brazil’s southern state of Mato Grosso do Sul

A spokesman for CIMI described the development as of ‘exceptional seriousness’.

In a letter to Brazil’s Justice Minsitry, he wrote: ‘This tribe has had its culture and lands attacked for centuries. They could now go down in history as being the tribe which wiped themselves out by committing collective suicide.

‘We must take the necessary measures to avert the worst.’

Indian tribes in southern Brazil have for years been fighting for the country to recognise their traditional lands, many of which now belong to farmers and rich landowners.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

You silly natives. Whats the purpose of killing yourselves? Take this to the UN instead. and file for sovereign statehood microstate style. The Vatican has a mere 2 square km and population of 800 and is already considered sovereign with a UN seat, but the Guarani-kaiowa have 4.6 million which is 5000 times more the right to sovereignty by population size, with 500 square kilometres which is 250 times in land size more right to sovereignty for a total of 1.2 million times more right than Vatican State to be a sovereign state, with a seat at the UN. Instead of suicide which is exactly what the land grabbers want, try the legal and formal method with lobbying as many supporting states as possible out of 192 viable states of the day (66.6% so that a quorum for legal sovereign statehood can occur) to support the tribe’s effort for statehood at the UN.

ARTICLE 18

Tibetan man dies after setting himself on fire at monastery in protest against Chinese rule

Seventh Tibetan dies from self-immolation this month
Nearly 60 Tibetans have set themselves alight in protest against Chinese rule since March 2011

A Tibetan man died after setting himself alight in the latest self-immolation protest against Chinese rule over the Himalayan region yesterday.

The fatal protest occurred at a prominent Tibetan monastery in Gansu province, northwestern China a London-based rights group said.

This is the seventh self-immolation death as a result of pro-Tibet protests against China this month, Free Tibet said.
The man’s body on fire near a prayer hall at the remote Labrang Monastery in China’s northwestern Gansu province

Deadly protest: The man’s body on fire near a prayer hall at the remote Labrang Monastery in China’s northwestern Gansu province

The protester, who has been identified as 50-year-old man named Dhondup, set fire to himself near the prayer hall at the remote Labrang Monastery on Monday morning.

The monastery is one of the most important outside of Tibet and was the site of numerous protests following deadly ethnic riots in Tibet in 2008.

Free Tibet said Monday’s self-immolation was the first to take place at Labrang Monastery, and that there have been heavy restrictions in place in the area in recent months.

Citing a witness, it said the monastery manager and other monks prevented police from taking Dhondup’s body.

The official Xinhua News Agency quoted a provincial government official as saying a 63-year-old herdsman set himself ablaze at the monastery but did not give the man’s name or say whether he survived.
Holy place: The self-immolation took place at Labrang monastery, which is one of the largest in Tibetan Buddhism

Holy place: The self-immolation took place at Labrang monastery, which is one of the largest in Tibetan Buddhism

Self-immolation as a way of protesting against Beijing’s heavy-handed rule in the region has increased in the past 18 months, Free Tibet said.

A reported 56 Tibetans have set themselves alight in ethnic Tibetan areas of China since March 2011.

The Chinese government has confirmed some of the self-immolations.

The Dalai Lama and representatives of the self-declared Tibetan government-in-exile in India say they oppose all violence.

‘Tibetan protests are escalating,’ Free Tibet director Stephanie Brigden said in a statement.

‘Dhondup is the eighth Tibetan in the last month alone who has risked his life to protest Chinese rule; seven of the eight have died.’

She said China’s government could recognize that Tibetan demands for freedom cannot be extinguished by force and that it “must enter into meaningful dialogue with Tibetan representatives, supported by the international community.’

SELF-IMMOLATION PROTESTS AGAINST CHINA

China says Tibet has always been part of its territory, but many Tibetans say the Himalayan region was virtually independent for centuries until Chinese troops invaded in the 1950s.

Beijing blames the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, for fanning anti-government sentiment and routinely purges monasteries and nunneries, where support for the Dalai Lama and Tibetan independence runs high.

Angry and desperate Tibetans have taken to self-immolation in protest, a centuries-long tradition which has become a type of radical political protest.

More than 500 have been reported in Western media since the 1960s.

In March this year a Tibetan man self-immolated in New Delhi, India, to protest a visit by the Chinese president.

In May, one man died and another was seriously injured after they set themselves alight in China’s Qinghai province, shouting pro-independence song and holding Tibetan flags.

The controversial method of protest is much debated among Tibetans themselves. Some Buddhists say suicide is violence, and therefore unacceptable, while others see self-sacrifice for a greater cause as legitimate.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

The Native Ameri-Indians as with the South American Tribes, also are in the same state as Tibet. If ‘the West’ wants to see Tibet free from China, then ‘the West’ will need to lead the way by relinquishing control over any Tribes and all at very least, microstate sized territory into sovereign nations. No amount of media reporting will work but pressure via many sovereign states forming in US or Canadian ‘Indian reservations’ become independent governments will be undeniable in effect. Sacrifice the power to empower Tibetans you ‘Westerners’! Self immolations do nothing! Legal UN work as above suggested will work for certain, China will see the USA as breaking up and will feel safe enough to drop control in Tibet (if even under control at all) as well in response.

ARTICLE 19

Drug firms are ‘risking lives by hiding bad trials and side effects of their medicines’ Calls for companies to be made to publish the results of all its trials – by Daniel Martin – PUBLISHED: 00:48 GMT, 24 October 2012 | UPDATED: 06:50 GMT, 24 October 2012

‘You have to ask yourself why is that being held back,’ she said. ‘This is hugely important. And it’s not just about wasting money. This very much matters.’

She called for all historic data to be published, adding it was ‘vitally important’ for patient safety.

‘This really is a current issue,’ she said. ‘It affects patient safety and it’s wasting millions. If we could see a release of all the historic data…I think we would have a completely different evidence base for medicine. I think it’s vitally important for patient safety.’

Her campaign is supported by senior figures at the Royal College of GPs, the British Medical Journal, the Lancet and the Cochrane Library, which holds the largest collection of reports on clinical trials.

Other drugs for which campaigners say full information has not been made available include weight loss drugs orlistat and rimonabant.

Critics of the system estimate that around half of all clinical trials are never published in academic journals – and that trials with positive results are twice as likely to be published.

Yesterday in the Commons, Lib Dem care minister Norman Lamb told Dr Wollaston: ‘The Government support transparency in publishing results of clinical trials, and they recognise that more can, and should, be done.

‘Greater transparency can only serve to further public confidence in the safety of medicines. I am happy for my noble Friend Lord Howe or me to meet her and experts to discuss this important issue further.’

Stephen Whitehead, chief executive of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, denied drugs firms were not being transparent.

‘As the representative body for pharmaceutical companies in the UK, we take the issue that we are not transparent in our undertaking of clinical trials and causing patient harm very seriously,’ he said.

‘There has been much discussion of clinical trial data transparency over recent weeks, but we stand firm in our position that, as one of the most heavily regulated enterprises in the world, we do not seek to mislead or misinform.

‘Regulation of the industry is rigorous. In the UK, if a medicine is to gain a licence, then the complete clinical trial dataset relating to quality, efficacy and safety must be submitted to the regulatory authorities for approval.

‘We realise that there is still work to be done as we continually move toward greater transparency.’

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Too many pharmacy lobbyists and GLC links make tranparency difficult. A very strict committee with no such links and sterling reputation for non-corruption AND ethical practice (i.e. very unpopular), is needed or the people will continue to suffer side effects and sudden deaths or whatever.

A successful missile test has ushered in a new era of warfare in which the U.S. military can take out electronic targets without destroying a single building.

The experimental missile fired bursts of high-power microwaves at several target buildings to fry the computers and electrical systems inside during a test at the Utah Test and Training Range on Oct. 16. Such results signaled success for the Counter-electronics High-powered Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) created by Boeing Phantom Works and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.

“In the near future, this technology may be used to render an enemy’s electronic and data systems useless even before the first troops or aircraft arrive,” said Keith Coleman, CHAMP program manager for Boeing Phantom Works.

The idea of using microwaves or electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) to knock out electronic systems without having to reduce cities or military bases to rubble first arose during Cold War nuclear tests. Nuclear explosions created EMPs that unexpectedly damaged some civilian power grids and facilities.

That spawned the military dream of a nonlethal takedown weapon that could disable an enemy’s radar, communications and targeting computers — effectively leaving them blind and unable to respond effectively to follow-up attacks by regular military forces. Such weapons could prove especially useful when assaulting enemies hidden in heavily populated cities or towns without causing civilian casualties.

But the secrecy surrounding U.S. military weapons research led some critics to argue that microwave weapons represented an impossible dream as recently as last month.

Such critics were apparently wrong. The CHAMP missile’s microwaves proved so effective during the recent test that they knocked out some of the cameras used to record video footage of rows of computers blinking off. CHAMP went on to hit seven targets during the one-hour test.

CHAMP’s three-year, $38 million program could eventually deploy up to five prototype missiles. The latest testing seems to suggest that Boeing and the Air Force have succeeded in creating a functional missile capable of taking out many targets with multiple shots.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

This technology is rendered ineffective with lead shielding aka ‘hardened’ devices. If MUON particle based waves are used then yes. But most counteries in the 1st world could well afford to install lead shielding over everysingle device or electronic item and that could render the new missile system ineffective in as soon as a few weeks for the military 2-10 years. I can just imgine Iran rushing to plate all their hardware or radar now.

ARTICLE 21

Fiona Phillips slams her former school for turning her into a ‘vile shoplifting teenager’ – by Daily Mail Reporter – PUBLISHED: 11:35 GMT, 25 October 2012 | UPDATED: 13:37 GMT, 25 October 2012

TV presenter Fiona Phillips has launched scathing attack on the education she received at her old school saying it transformed her from a promising pupil into a ‘vile teenager’.

The 51-year-old claimed teachers at Millbrook School in Southampton, Hants, in the 70s crushed her aspirations and left her with just one O-level.

She said: ‘I went in and said I wanted to be a doctor and they said “have you thought about hairdressing?”‘
Rant: Fiona Phillips slammed the education she received at Millbrook School in Southampton when she was invited to be a guest speaker at a ceremony celebrating their rebranding as an Academy

Rant: Fiona Phillips slammed the education she received at Millbrook School in Southampton when she was invited to be a guest speaker at a ceremony celebrating their rebranding as an Academy

The former GMTV presenter’s rant came at what was supposed to be a celebratory ceremony for the rebranding of her former school as a new Academy.

She had been invited to attend as a guest speaker but left former pupils, governors and teachers outraged by her unflattering comments.

She said her education had been an ‘eye-opener’ and turned her into a ‘vile teenager’ who was arrested for shoplifting.

And she regaled those attending with tales of how she and her peers locked a teacher in a cupboard and threw another over a bush.

Blame: The TV presenter said the school turned her into a ‘vile’ shopping-lifting teenager

Her speech at the new 16 million pounds Oasis Academy Lord’s Hill School even saw her brand former head, Fred Lowry, a man who ‘commanded no respect whatsoever’.

Ms Phillips said: ‘It was a school rampant with hormones and no discipline, no aspiration and no encouragement. I went in and said I wanted to be a doctor and they said “have you thought about hairdressing?”

‘I can remember being in classes throwing furniture around. We locked a fashion teacher in a cupboard and threw one over a bush, and that was normal behaviour.
Guest speaker: Fiona Phillips with founder of the Oasis Trust, Steve Chalke, left, and principal Ian Golding. She left many outraged by the content of her speech

Innocence lost: A young Fiona with her brother Mark in 1969. She said her secondary school transformed her from a promising pupil into a vile teen

‘My mother was in despair because I was so vile to her. They used to come and pick me up from the police station after I had been caught for shop lifting. I was in fights after school, I won’t even go into what else went on.

‘My mother couldn’t believe that this constant pupil had turned into this vile teenager.

‘I left with one O-level in English language, purely because I read a lot and all my education came from home.’

Ms Phillips said she had left primary school at the ‘top of her class’ and her arrival at Millbrook School had been an ‘eye-opener’.

She went on to say the teaching staff did ‘nothing’ to shore up educational standards.
‘Not proud of the educuation I had there’: The TV presenter was invited to celebrate the opening of the school’s new building, pictured, and used it as an opportunity to criticise her time at the school in the 70s

‘Not proud of the educuation I had there’: The TV presenter was invited to celebrate the opening of the school’s new building, pictured, and used it as an opportunity to criticise her time at the school in the 70s

She added: ‘I’m proud to say I went to Millbrook School. I’m not proud of the education I had there.’

And if that wasn’t enough, she then raged about the area of Millbrook, saying she was ‘angry’ there had been ‘hardly any investment in nearly half a century.’

The speech has drawn angry criticism from former pupils and governors who have come forward to defend their school.
Attack: Fiona branded her former head, Fred Lowry, pictured, a man who ‘commanded no respect whatsoever’

One, who was a pupil at the same time as Ms Phillips, said: ‘There was nothing wrong with the school nor the pupils who worked hard at their education. Perhaps if Ms Phillips had not spent so much time throwing furniture and teachers around she may have got more out of her time there.

‘I left school with seven O-levels. I went to college and worked for my A-levels and went to university and worked for my degree.

‘I know from personal experience that many of my fellow Millbrook pupils did the same – more than the national average for the time.’

Mayor Derek Burke, a former governor of Millbrook School, accused Ms Phillips of ‘dramatic licence’ saying it ‘wasn’t nearly as bad as she painted’.

He added current head teachers in the city he had spoken to had told him they were ‘very uncomfortable’ with her remarks.

Speaking about former head Fred Lowry, Cllr Burke said: ‘I knew Fred. He was a good head teacher of the school. I believe he had respect.’

He added his own daughters had attended the school and had achieved lots of GCSEs, along with their friends.

Councillor Don Thomas, a pupil at Millbrook School’s predecessor in the 1960s, also came to the school’s defence.

He said: ‘It’s not appropriate for her to be criticising a former local authority school which did a good job in difficult circumstances.’
Success: Fiona went on to be a presenter on GMTV and is pictured here interviewing Tony Blair when he was the Prime Minister

Success: Fiona went on to be a presenter on GMTV and is pictured here interviewing Tony Blair when he was the Prime Minister

He said he had been contacted by one resident who was very angry at Ms Phillips’ outburst.

He added: ‘They were upset at Millbrook being badmouthed. They said it was a good school and proud to go to it.’

In the 1970s and ‘80s Millbrook was one of the largest schools in Southampton with more than 1,200 pupils. Fred Lowry was the head teacher between 1972 and 1988 after moving from St George’s C of E School.

The 85-year-old, who is now retired and living in Ashurst, Hants, declined to comment on Ms Phillips’ accusations.

Ms Phillips was unavailable for comment today.
They could have seen it coming: Fiona previously slated school in her autobiography

Fiona Phillips talked about her ‘lack of education’ at her secondary school in her biography, Before I Forget, published in 2010…
Fiona Phillips autobiography: Before I Forget

‘I found myself dealing with 12-year-olds who had talked about things I didn’t even know the name of. Girls in the fifth year were pregnant, boys were in borstal, and the school seemed to be a hotbed of carnal curiosity and knowledge,’ she wrote.

‘I was in the top set for everything, but that didn’t mean much in a school that struggled so much with discipline and lack of ambition. We were supposedly the elite of the school, yet our maths classes consisted of being given an exercise book and told which pages to work on, before the teacher left and returned at the end of the lesson to go through the answers, when she hadn’t explained how to tackle the questions in the first place.

‘There wasn’t much point in trying to learn when most of the pupils were set against it and their parents didn’t care.’

In some ways I can believe what she said. I went to Belfairs Girls High School in the 70’s and our careers teacher (who was also our RE teacher) had more or less made her mind up what we would be fit for when we left school even before we went for the interview. I said I wanted to be a nurse or work with people and she said the only job I would get would be a lavatory attendant (seriously). She was like this with loads of us and didn’t endear her to the pupils. Although I couldn’t stand the woman (no longer with us) I suppose she was in fact correct, I worked with the elderly for many years which entailed personal care and cleaning up after them and then bought a guest house where I spent years cleaning all the toilets the guests had used every day. Now fortunately I’m retired and only have to clean my own. Some teachers really should not be teachers and Fiona is only saying it how she saw it.

– Rubyjas , Bridlington East Yorkshire, 25/10/2012 13:40

Why is anyone surprised that a victim of the catastrophic errors and the culture of mediocrity in state education condemns their experience of it? We need re-introduce discipline, focus on the basics of grammar, spelling and maths, welcome competition and celebrate success.

– Slumdog27 , Somewhere in the South, 25/10/2012 13:43

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Big deal. Try the Ghettos scools in the 3rd world or even ghetto schools in the first world (i.e. Singapore) for a REAL eye opener. Fiona at least had the fun of being ‘disruptively cool’ and protected by the over reaching human rights awareness for children in the first world, not that Human Rights in the first world are exactly tolerable by the civiliseds’ standards in any case.

What’s striking about Mitt Romney is the amount of questions he dodges during the Republican debates. This analysis was given credence by the FOX News debate poll, which had the crowd favourite Ron Paul coming out on top. Clearly the frontrunner for the Republicans, (why I don’t know), he has managed to emerge victorious from his opening two primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire. Romney gave a reasonable showing in Iowa and considering he has a summer house in New Hampshire, he had considerable sway there.

But his message is consistently inconsistent and this will always be a vulnerability of his. As governor of Boston he was pro-abortion and in fact a supporter of an Obama-styled healthcare package for his state. Both versions of policy he is now deriding in a desperate attempt to illustrate some form of difference, contrasting him from Obama, though in reality they couldn’t be more similar and pathetic as a politician could get.

Besides his ridiculous hair-style and clearly sprayed on tan, let’s dig a little deeper into what his policies are. He plans to repeal “Obama-care,” which didn’t go far enough for progressives. The former governor wants to make Israel the first place he visits, perhaps to shore up relations, despite Israeli influence over Congress never being more profound in recent history. Then there’s the war-mongering rhetoric, which he has spewed with his fellow Republican natives against Iran, with the exception of Ron Paul. So as a candidate compared to Obama and the rest of the Republicans, he’s no better nor is he distinguishable.

Then there’s great intrigue surrounding his financial background, which he is using as a source of experience to help get the American people into work and believe he can get the economy moving. Romney talks about how he has decades of understanding in the private sector and how this has amalgamated him into the perfect candidate to lead the United States out of recession. One must also look into his background in economics before determining whether or not he is indeed the man he says he is. As head of Bain capital, a private equity firm, Romney espouses how he helped invest in new and vibrant businesses and how some went bust, without going into too much detail.

The reality is he’s nothing but a capitalist whore who has ripped the guts out of some businesses after purchasing them on the cheap and after he’s sold off the vital assets of a company; This eventually leading to the company itself being sold and hundreds of employees being laid off, despite the workers being informed of the contrary. Romney comes across as a certain Gordon Gekko out of Wall Street, only this time playing the role of capital venture mogul turned political stooge. To make things worse he has made off with a significant profit with his capitalist cronies to the detriment of the average Joe. Not only has he committed acts that are morally reprehensible but he’s had the gall to laud them as successes.

Ironic that the moron – I mean Mormon – spews such hogwash when analysing the great benefactors behind his bid for Presidency. From recent studies it was revealed that Romney was the second greatest recipient of funding from Wall Street after Barack Obama. It was the financial terrorists on Wall Street which are comprised of a conglomerate of banking giants and corporate investors which coerced the country along with the world into dire straits in the first place!

He talks about a fair deal for all Americans but even his own taxes are a source of contention making it even harder for him to relate to many voters. The former Boston governor’s personal fortune is close to two hundred and fifty million dollars. Not to the surprise of the informed he only pays fifteen per cent tax. Which informs the masses of two things; firstly he has clearly exploited tax loopholes and secondly he is no different from any other candidate in the running for the presidential candidacy.

If Romney wins the Republican nomination as is predicted by many, the Presidential election in November will be a foregone conclusion. Obama will walk to victory because he is a better campaigner and debater than his counterpart. Romney can be targeted on many things from his flip-flopping over policies to his economic background, which is sure to stoke up the class divide. The only nominee of both parties who can represent a stark contrast and hope for change is Ron Paul, whether or not he gets the chance will remain to be seen.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Unless Obama does something ‘drastic’ to the worst of Islamic Theocracy nations and elsewhere where there are no Human Rights or where Human Rights are routinely abused, the Islamist Fundamentalists deserve Romney aka Bush III. Even if USA’s last bash would be to take out the worst of humanity, I’m sure Russia and other military powers would at least not invade the USA afterwards. Go for broke Americans! Neo-colonialism doesn’t seem so bad as compared to fundamentalist theocracy . . .

Labour MP Jon Cruddas was given an eight-month ban at Westminster Magistrates
He put paying for MoT and insurance on a to-do list – but forgot
As policy co-ordinator he is in charge of keeping track of Labour’s ideas to win the election

Labour MP and policy co-ordinator John Cruddas told Westminster Magistrate’s Court he put paying for his insurance and MoT on a to-do list, and forgot to do it

The man in charge of Labour’s election manifesto was banned from driving for eight months today – because he forgot to get insurance and an MoT.

Jon Cruddas told magistrates he had made a note on a ‘to-do’ list to get the vehicle covered but it slipped his mind and he drove without cover for 10 days.

The conviction is especially embarrassing because as Labour’s policy chief he is supposed to be keeping track of all the ideas being used to fill in Ed Miliband’s infamous ‘black sheet of paper’ to win the 2015 general election.

Cruddas, 50, is married to Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill, an aide to Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman.

The MP for Dagenham and Rainham was pulled over by police near Hyde Park on July 6 after they spotted what appeared to be a defective brake light.

When he was pulled over in his grey Land Rover Freelander, he said: ‘Sorry I don’t have insurance.’

Today in the dock at Westminster Magistrate’s Court he pleaded guiting to driving without insurance and an MoT.

He had received a letter from Land Rover warning him his insurance had run out, but he had not got round to renewing it.

The court heard Cruddas, who once stood to be Labour’s deputy leader, already had six points on his license for speeding, so a further six points would have meant a compulsory driving ban.

Defending, Mark McDonald said Cruddas had a ‘to-do list’ which including paying for everything, but he forgot.

‘He thought he had an extra week and as a circumstance, he was driving with no insurance. It was in a file on a to-do list. He forgot.’

Sentencing the MP, District Judge John Zani said: ‘It is a straight-forward situation – you didn’t check the letter and you didn’t get round to do your to-do list.

‘I take into account you are a good character and haven’t wasted time. I also take into account the effect on other people. Punishment will be suffered by you and other people because of where you work.’

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Does Jon John Cruddas know that if enough MPs waive the need for insurance as below link discussed, that there will be nothing to be guilty of?

How does having an MP who did not consider the right to amend the law to allow opt outs, without being penalised in the Criminal Code instead, Jon had to waste time and money – this drags down productivity no end for effectively a non-offense and is entirely against the spirit of the law help the voters better now being less able to move around in his own vehicle for something thus meanigless? 3 terms anyway? So GTFO of Parliament that will at least see a more proactive and better ‘memoried’ MP take over and begin amendments as suggested!

The following women are not attractive to Donald Trump: Angelina Jolie (“She’s been with so many guys”), Cher (“bad plastic surgery”), Rosie O’Donnell (“big, fat pig”), and now, Arianna Huffington.

On Wednesday, Trump used his Twitter account to call the internet powerhouse “unattractive both inside and out.” He went on to attack her marriage, which ended in an amicable divorce.

“I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man-he made a good decision,” Trump added in less than 140 characters.

It’s not the first time he’s publicly judged a successful female media figure by her looks and intimate life, and it probably won’t be the last.

Trump’s world seems to be divided into three categories. Women he finds attractive. Women he doesn’t find attractive. And Men. It’s not so different from a Miss USA pageant, only “contestants” like Huffington don’t ask to be entered.

Huffington smartly refused to take the bait and refrained from responding, possibly avoiding another drawn out Trump vs. Barbara Walters feud.

In the past, both male and female columnists at major media outlets have labeled Trump “a sexist dinosaur,” with “a legacy of unapologetically gleeful misogyny.” These days nobody’s wasting words trying to prove that point, when Trump seems to do the job all on his own. Here are some of the

gems from the mouth of a modern day caveman:

“All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me – consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.”
-From his book How to Get Rich.

“So when he had plenty of money, she liked him…But then after that, not as good, right?”
-In response to an Access Hollywood interview question on Anne Hathaway’s split from her jailed ex-boyfriend.

“I’ll send one of my friends to pick up her girlfriend and I think it would be very easy.”
-On Rosie O’Donnell and his own mysteriously beguiling friends, as reported by The New York Daily News.

“She does have a very nice figure . . . if [she] weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”
-On his daughter, Ivanka, during a interview on the The View.

“You look very good, Aubrey, I have to say, Do you mind if I say? Is that sexist?”
-On Aubrey O’Day’s boardroom appearance during an episode of The Apprentice.

“The early victories by women on The Apprentice were to a very large extent dependent on their sex appeal.”
-On women’s success on The Apprentice, from How to Get Rich.

“I believe we’re all equal except women still have to try harder and they know it. They will do what they have to do to get the job done and will not necessarily be demure about it.”
-More on women’s success, from How to Get Rich.

“Oftentimes when I was sleeping with one of the top women in the world I would say to myself, thinking about me as a boy from Queens, ‘can you believe what I am getting?'”
-On former romantic partners, from Think Big: Make it Happen in Business and Life.

“Beauty and elegance, whether in a woman, a building, or a work of art is not just superficial or something pretty to see.”
-On inanimate objects and women, from Trump 101: The Way to Success

“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of [expletive].”
-On media zen and women’s body parts, from a 1991 Esquire interview.

Any ‘unapologetically gleeful misogyny’ is only for and usable by alpha males. Even wealthy betas like Bill Gates do not, or dare not use ‘unapologetically gleeful misogyny’. And due to socialised pressure, the alpha male is an increasingly rare species these days.

Good role model for those able to fathom this guy or where this guy is coming from but physicality wise, doubtful could take on Putin (more Trump is more Alpha Slick than Alpha Hardman, even as some of us are only mindset based Alpha Minor . . . ), though mindset wise probably on same standing. Both of these guys though lack beards (Alpha Major) . . . in any case, the real alpha males should set up the last international Gentlemen’s Club before the whole Alpha-male type/meme disappears . . . Club Alpha or Alpha Club, for “Playboy/Hustler/Penthouse/Miss World loving”, full bearded, hairy (thanks JB or was that DM . . . ), lantern jawed, bald from too much testosterone (not anything else though), Hells Angel type club joining, Car Modding, gladiatorial game playing, bull riding/fighting, male f—ing (females too delicate, would break . . . try this for hyper masculinity lol!), 2nd amendment loving, alcohol swilling, organic drug taking males only.

The rest of the slack jawed f@99ot, PC, metrosexual types are for alpha females unable to find alpha males (betas females are best for beta males if a Matriarchy is not intended . . . ), OR alpha females socially twisted into ‘Lordosis’ ‘male bashing’ or accidental same-sex (socialised m2m or f2f are incidental not genetic, so differentiate to avoid much grief and regret later on) type behaviour. So would alpha females serious enough get that lab to grow a penis and a pair (set of testicles) with. But don’t go around subverting already estrogenized metro-males who are no challenge even as no females could ever be larger than the largest male or more ethical than the most ‘testosteronized’ males . . .

“She’s been with so many guys (of Angelina Jolie)” . . . never really looked at this from that angle. Thanks Trump! It’s informed now! Now how about running for Governor or even President to change some laws for the 99%? Back to the Future 2 (Robert Zemeckis 1989) cannot occur without Trump on the scene! ‘Biff” (Thomas F. Wilson)’s an Alpha!

Todd Akin and the Second Sex – Posted by Judith Thurman – August 27, 2012

Naw, just demogoguery, Todd wouldn’t rape a fly . . . or was that the other way around . . . ugh . . . anyway too many GOPs should be dropped for term limitlessness if not crony capitalism . . .

Simone de Beauvoir’s foundational treatise on gender inequality, “The Second Sex,” was published in France in 1949, a year after the author—a thirty-eight-year-old public intellectual—was allowed to vote for the first time. French women, so belatedly enfranchised, would not have access to legal birth control until 1967, or to legal first-trimester abortions until 1975.

In 1971, Beauvoir took the lead in her countrywomen’s struggle for reproductive rights. She wrote a declaration, “The Manifesto of 343,” that exposed her and her fellow-signers—some of France’s leading female artists, actors, writers, jurists, and filmmakers—to criminal prosecution. (It also exposed them to degrading ridicule of a now-familiar sort. Forty years before Rush Limbaugh aired his repulsive fantasies about Sandra Fluke, the declaration was nicknamed “The Manifesto of the 343 Sluts.”)

“One million women in France have an abortion every year,” Beauvoir’s declaration began. “Condemned to secrecy, they have them in dangerous conditions…. These women are veiled in silence. I declare that I am one of them. I have had an abortion.”

Not all of the women who signed Beauvoir’s manifesto had actually had an abortion. Some of them, like Violette Leduc, the lesbian writer, may never have had sex with a man. The point was to stand together on behalf of the “veiled.” And in 1971, I was one of the veiled. I was a single woman just out of college, far from home, living marginally, without a partner, who found herself pregnant.

It is sometimes hard to remember that abortion has not been a crime in the United States since Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973. If politicians like Todd Akin and Paul Ryan prevail, it will be a crime again, under all circumstances, along with some forms of contraception that can spare women from a hard choice that they have to live with, one way or another, for the rest of their lives.

Akin disgraced himself as a benighted zealot by blathering about “legitimate rape,” but it’s a mistake, I think, to focus one’s outrage on the trauma of rape and incest victims, on teen-age girls of severely limited mental capacity who are conned by predators, or on patients who have been told by their physicians that a full-term pregnancy may kill them. Forcing such women to bear a child violates their integrity in a barbaric fashion—it rapes them twice.

But most women who seek abortions do not fall into those categories. They are our neighbors, daughters, sisters, granddaughters, and colleagues. They come in every size and color. They are rich and poor. They are Republicans and Democrats. They are churchgoers and atheists. They are married, single, and divorced. Some ardently want a family—when the time is right. Some of them have children already. But they have this in common: at some point between the onset of puberty and the end of menopause—and one neither wants nor needs to know the circumstances, it is none of our business—they had a sexual encounter that resulted in an accidental conception, and they couldn’t go through with it.

Here is where the Akin uproar leads us to perilous ground. “Legitimate rape” (or “forcible rape,” as the Congressman put it in his apology for having “misspoke”) is a coded expression that everyone in its target audience understands. It conjures the image of a Victorian maiden ravished by a villain in a cloak and a top hat, twirling his mustache as she flails on the railroad tracks (hey writer you forgot the Mr.Peanut brand type Monocle . . . ) . It implies that there are “legitimate” victims—and only certifiably “pure” women fall into that category. Everyone else had it coming.

“The Second Sex” is an exhaustive study of the ways that misogyny has, from time immemorial, been disguised as righteousness. Todd Akin and Paul Ryan want to write a new chapter to the story. If you are saved, you need not fear their policies. If you are fallen, you will pay the price. They would lower the veil of shame and silence on a new generation. But if we let this become a debate about female virtue, rather than about female self-determination, we have lost it.

One generation ahead of ya Todd . . .

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Todd does not speak the language of ‘occultism’ and nor do those attacking Todd. The *body* and the *spirit* are different ‘people’. A rapist rapes ONLY when the spirit in the woman allows or calls to the spirit in the man (this is how Burkha clad women who cannot even be seen are even raped to begin with), OR the spirit of the rapist is not in control. Todd Akin is not to be blamed for the clumsy language use, ‘Legitimate’ means Spirit to Spirit, nothing else . . . this is not a commonly broached subject in society where spirit and brain are seperate leading to all kinds of abuses in the name of ‘mental health’ to enable the culling from society people aware of the differences between spirit and brain (the feminazis, demogogues and psychiatric establishment, also henpecked male politicians, collude on this one to take out as many right minded people as possible . . . this comes from experience . . . ). But needs to take up some language and ‘spirit of language’ courses. The viciousness directed against Todd though is inequitable. Todd dropping semi-wonky language from lack of training means nothing about character and ONLY the same could be done back to Todd. Not threats of AIDS infected rape or drowning.

Todd Akin most probably does not have interest in raping anyone (even if Todd does, he’d have too much to lose by doing so, makes no sense), we also do know that to even become a Congressman, the discipline needs to be there, especially for 2 terms limited types not drunk with power for decades. As for mysogyny factor, so long as there is no intent to hurt anyone, and if all persons subject to mysogyny are consensual, no issue. Please don’t threaten Congressmen with AIDS rapes or drownings- might be actionable. Todd Akin may have described the above clumsily and look like Kurtwood Smith who played Clarence J. Boddicker in Robocop 1 (1987 Paul Verhoeven), but that does not mean Todd should be subject to this sort of abuse.

Perhaps those threatening Todd need to get their heads checked instead . . . I do however suggest that since Todd has been in ‘power’ for more than 2 terms, that Todd relinquish that seat anyway for someone that Todd could endorse that is similarly minded. Oligarchic term limitlessness destroys democracy, and Todd looks like part of the problem of technicalities in ethics for bettering democracy rather than the solution or being an exemplar. Careerist politicians are a sad relic of the past. Todd voted well on several bills but has not forwarded any useful bills or at even bills to redistribute land to the poor or come up with anything useful for all those stints in taxpayer paid for posts.

Todd voted for carrying concealed weapons GOOD (2nd Amendment is always good, the bigger the weapon the better . . . )
Todd voted against the parks and soils sales tax GOOD (The Iraq war is not over, the last thing USA needs is Crony Capitalism gardening companies bleeding tax payers)
Todd voted against the 1993 tax increase and education spending increase GOOD (Prevented Crony Capitalism)
Todd sponsored legislation to prohibit casino companies from contributing to Missouri state lawmakers. GOOD (Ethical)

Todd is anti-abortion rights, BAD (Authoritarian, the state does not control women’s bodies . . . but spiritual issue of partially formed life is very serious – perhaps could be dealt with via formulation between various faiths the best way to safely ensure partly formed ‘Foetids’ are able to ‘re-enter’ the circle of life properly)

How about redistribution of un-used state land to the homeless or poor due for foreclosures? A semi-thoughtful man who did not delve deep enough into the above before speaking . . .

ARTICLE 3

Man on trial for paedophilia to use ‘my brain made me do it’ defence – August 29, 2012

Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik was sane when he killed 77 people last year. — Reuters pic
LONDON, Aug 29 — He was once a respected paediatrician, loved by patients and their parents for over 30 years. Now Domenico Mattiello faces trial for paedophilia, accused of making sexual advances towards little girls in his care.

Scientific experts will argue in court that his damaged brain made him do it, and his lawyers will ask for leniency.

It’s the latest example of how neuroscience — the science of the brain and how it works — is taking the stand and beginning to challenge society’s notions of crime and punishment.

The issue has been thrown into the spotlight by new technologies, like structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET) scans and DNA analysis that can help pinpoint the biological basis of mental disorders.

A series of recent studies has established that psychopathic rapists and murderers have distinct brain structures that show up when their heads are scanned using MRI.

And in the United States, two companies, one called No Lie MRI and another called Cephos Corp, are advertising lie-detection services using fMRI to lawyers and prosecutors.

Crime and punishment

While structural MRI scans show the structure of a brain and can highlight differences between one brain and another, PET and fMRI scans can also show the brain in action, lighting up at particular points when the brain engages in certain tasks.

But the dazzling new technologies and detailed genetic data leave unanswered the issue of whether criminal courts are the right place to use this new information.

“The worry is that the law, or at least some judges, might be so overawed by the technology that they start essentially delegating the decision about guilt to a particular form of test,” says Colin Blakemore, a professor of neuroscience at Oxford University.

The lawyers for American serial killer Brian Dugan, who was facing execution in Illinois after pleading guilty to raping and killing a 10-year-old girl, used scans of his brain activity to argue he had mental malfunctions and should be spared the death penalty. In the event, Illinois abolished capital

punishment while he was on death row.

In a court in the Indian city of Mumbai, a woman was convicted of murder based only on circumstantial evidence and a so-called brain electrical oscillations signature profiling (BEOS) test, the results of which prosecutors said suggested she was guilty.

The days when mental capacity for crime is argued over by psychiatrists unaided by sophisticated machinery — such as Friday’s verdict that Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik was sane when he killed 77 people — look numbered.

“All sorts of types of neuroscience evidence are being used for all sorts of types of claims,” says Teneille Brown, a professor of law at the University of Utah. “The question is, is this technology really ready for prime time, or is it being abused?”

“Acquired paedophilia”

In Mattiello’s case, the neuroscientific evidence will come in the form of a full psychiatric and biological analysis including an MRI brain scan that shows a roughly 4-centimetre tumour growing at the base of his brain.

This created pressure inside his skull and “altered his behaviour”, says Pietro Pietrini, a molecular geneticist and psychiatrist at Italy’s University of Pisa who is compiling an expert report on the 65-year-old.

“His previous behaviour was completely normal,” Pietrini told Reuters. “He was a paediatrician for 30 something years and he saw tens of thousands of children and never had any problem. The question is why, at some point, did someone who has always behaved properly suddenly change so drastically?”

The doctor was arrested in Vicenza, northern Italy, more than a year ago and is undergoing cancer treatment after having the tumour removed. Pietrini is due to see him again next month to continue his assessment and see the effects of the treatment.

The case, which has yet go to court, is strikingly similar to another of “acquired paedophilia” dating back to 2002, in which a 40-year-old married American schoolteacher suddenly became obsessed with sex and began secretly to collect child pornography.

He was eventually removed from the family home for making sexual advances towards his stepdaughter and convicted of paedophilia. But later medical examinations found he had an egg-sized tumour in a part of the brain involved in decision-making.

When the tumour was removed, the man recovered from his paedophilic tendencies and was able to return to his family.

Experts are generally agreed that conditions like psychopathy and paedophilia can’t be “cured”, but in this groundbreaking case it appeared that removing the tumour, and hence the pressure in the brain, may have re-established his ability to control impulses.

As in that case, Pietrini said he and colleague Giuseppe Sartori of Padua University believed Mattiello’s tumour “may well have played a role in altering his behaviour”.

“This is what we will be arguing,” Pietrini said. “But of course it will be for the judge to determine to what extent he believes this medical condition played a role.”

Oxford’s Blakemore, one of the world’s leading thinkers in this field, says such cases are “startling”.

“It makes one wonder about the notion of responsibility,” he said in an interview.

Is “my brain made me do it” a defence?

And when it comes to prison, should paedophiles, psychopaths and other violent criminals be punished less severely if their behaviour can be blamed on biology? Is “my brain made me do it” a defence that warrants recognition with lighter sentences, or even no jail time at all?

“(It) raises the whole issue of what you think sentencing is for,” says Blakemore. “Is it about punishment? Is it about retribution? Is it about remediation and rehabilitation? Is it about protecting society? Well, to some extent it’s about all of those things.”

Recent evidence — from both real and hypothetical cases — suggests judges are sympathetic to neurobiological evidence as mitigation.

A study published in the journal Science this month showed that criminal psychopaths in the United States whose lawyers provide biological evidence for their brain condition are more likely to be sentenced to shorter jail terms than those who are simply said to be psychopaths.

For the study, researchers at the University of Utah tweaked the real-life case of Stephen Mobley, a 39-year-old American who was sentenced to death in 1994 after robbing a Domino’s pizza place in Georgia and shooting dead the restaurant’s manager.

At his trial, Mobley’s lawyer presented evidence in mitigation showing the accused had a variant of a gene called MAO-A that has been dubbed the “warrior” gene after scientists found it was linked to violent behaviour.

Aggressive genes

In the Science study, judges were given a hypothetical case loosely based on Mobley’s, where the crime was a savage beating with a gun, rather than a fatal shooting.

All the judges were told the defendant was a psychopath, but only half were given expert testimony on the genetic and neurobiological causes of his psychopathy. Those who got the neuroscientific evidence were more likely to give a shorter sentence – generally about a year less, the study found.

Pietrini worked on a similar real-life case in Italy in 2009 — thought to be one of the first criminal cases in Europe to use this type of neuroscientific evidence.

It involved Abdelmalek Bayout, an Algerian living in Italy, who was tried and convicted for fatally stabbing a man who teased him in the street.

After conducting a series of tests on the Algerian, Pietrini and colleagues said they had found abnormalities in imaging scans of his brain, and in five genes that have been linked to violent behaviour — including MAO-A.

A 2002 study led by researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London linked low levels of MAO-A with aggressiveness and criminal behaviour in boys who were raised in abusive environments.

Bayout’s lawyers got his sentence reduced by arguing that this and other bad genes had affected his brain and were partly to blame for the attack.

Where will it end?

Experts say it’s almost inevitable that neuroscience and law will become yet more intertwined. After all, while neuroscience seeks to find out how the brain functions and affects behaviour, the law’s main concern is with regulating behaviour.

Yet many are uneasy about the use in courts of law — and in matters of life and death — of basic science that is only just creeping out of the lab.

Observers such as Hank Greely, a professor of law at Stanford University, point out that no scientific peer-reviewed studies have been published demonstrating that BEOS — the brain test used in the Mumbai case — actually works.

Others stress that while genes like MAO-A have been associated with violence, there are also plenty of people with similar genotypes who don’t go out and kill, rape or abuse.

“Neuroscience is being used by serious scientists in real labs, but the people trying to apply it in courts are not those same people,” says Utah’s Brown. “So they’re taking something that looks very objective, that looks like gold standard science, but then morphing it into a forensic use it wasn’t developed for.

Seena Fazel, a clinical senior lecturer in forensic psychiatry at Oxford University, says he’s uncomfortable with the long-term implications and wonders where it will end.

There are already known biological bases for many brain disorders criminals suffer from, including drug addiction, alcoholism and antisocial personality disorder, which is thought to affect up to half of all those in prison.

“If psychopathy reduces your sentence because it has a biological basis, why shouldn’t these other more common conditions also result in reduced sentences? The problem here is where do we draw the line?” — Reuters

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

One’s spirit can only do so much healing before, calling quits. The physical brain may not have been aware and continuing such work created the tumour from the spirit’s dissatisfaction. In response, the paediatrician began TAKING back for the spirit by predating the children instead. One can only want to do so much healing. The capacity of the spirit may be boundless to the point of earthquakes and tornadoes, but a spirit who healed perhaps the 1000th or even 100th child decided to retire, and the physical man with the physical brain continued at the spirit’s expense which led to a tumor that specifically caused paedophelia or other harmful behaviour. Perhaps many bankers and politicians, even priests of large orders need to retire once a number of years have passed or a number of years of work have been offered, monetary renumeration is not what the spirit wants, the brain does not understand, but the spirit will make it’s will known in any number of ways like ailments.

ARTICLE 4

We’re more comfortable with sex on TV…but should we plug the filth flood before it’s too late? – by Andy Dawson – Wednesday, 29 August 2012 at 2:26 pm

We’re more comfortable with sex on TV…but should we plug the filth flood before it’s too late?As a 1980s teenager, finally deemed old enough to be allowed to stay up late and watch TV with my parents, it was the moment I feared the most – THE SEX BIT. On the screen that is, not in the living room. For both myself and my parents, short-term mortification was guaranteed every single time.

Of course, as this was almost thirty years ago, so when I say THE SEX BIT I’m referring to nothing more sizzlicious than the sight of a woman in her underwear, an extended bout of what Britain’s swimming pool law-enforcers call ‘heavy petting’, or if I was lucky/unlucky enough, actual female toplessness.

See even today, I’m still struggling to grasp for the correct terminology while maintaining my composure. But I have to confess that it isn’t working – my hands are becoming clammy and my brow fevered as I poke the words ‘female toplessness’ out on my sweat-drenched keyboard.

Back then, during one of those infrequent but time-stopping sexy TV flashpoints, if someone were to run in to the living room and conduct a straw poll as to whether there was too much sex on TV, the outcome would be a resounding 100% affirmative vote.

Mind you, if someone were to run in to the living room and steal our eyeballs from right out of the front of our heads, there would be very little dissent. We were all too busy trying to pretend that what we were witnessing wasn’t happening, while straining to stem the crimson tide of embarrassment that was flooding our faces.

But it’s 2012 now and attitudes are changing – Britain is loose and groovy now. A recent Ofcom poll found that just 25% of adults are unhappy with the amount of sex on the small-screen, a figure that is down from 36% in 2005. Perhaps some of them are unhappy because they’re not seeing enough sex, who knows. The fact that only 19% were offended by something they’d seen over the past 12 months suggests that might well be the case.

So what’s happening to us all? Are we in the midst of a new 21st century permissive society? Is the sight of televised rutting now as normal to us as that of Jeremy Kyle haranguing an absent, glue-addled dad?

If many of us are indeed more comfortable with the sight of what the French commonly call ‘the flesh fandango’, perhaps broadcasters will bend to our will and tailor more of their post-watershed programmes to our increased thirst for boot-knocking.

For years now, knuckle-dragging observers have yearned for the first televised full-blown sexual encounter in the Big Brother house. Perhaps it already happened – I genuinely couldn’t care less. But surely it’s time for the BBC to steal the march and give us the first ever full-blown sex scene in Eastenders, preferably in the Queen Vic, during a lock in. As for what form it takes, I don’t care as long as Jean Slater is involved (I have niche tastes, shush, mind your own business).

Surely it’s time for David Attenborough to stop traversing the globe and obsessing over the mating habits of boring old animals and secrete himself away in a wardrobe in a Surrey semi instead, fastidiously commentating on the passionate wranglings of a middle-aged middle manager and his partner of choice. As for the potential that is inherent in a new-look, post-sexy-revolution Strictly Come Dancing – well, the mind boggles. Oh, my hands are getting clammy again.

But telly sex isn’t for everyone and there would need to be a two-tier system with a quick and easy opt out available. Fair warning should be given ahead of any graphic sex scene and a simple push of the red button would switch to an alternative broadcast, with all of the rude bits covered by an animation of Cardinal Keith O’Brien monotonously braying the words ‘this is not actually happening’.

Is it what we really want though? Before long we’ll be living in a new era of wall-to-wall filth and we won’t even know how it happened. We’re almost certainly just a few years away from a time where the major source of living room awkwardness is when dad realises that the TV remote is wedged firmly beneath the writhing bodies of his 19-year-old daughter and her boyfriend.

Be careful what you wish for.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Dawson is looking at this in a wrong manner. There could be ‘stiff’ channels for the upper classes, ‘semi-stiff’ for the middle classes, and ‘groovy’ channels for the lower classes. The viewership records merely show where society is headed. In a poorer lower class majority society, people will be ‘playing’ at home or at the cheaper part of the RLD mainly to relax, in a middle majority society people will be playing outside in non-RLD venues to sorta exercise, in a wealthy society people will be playing at the upper class venues to challenge themselves. No need to worry, rather look at the macro economic issues. I think Dawson isn’t really familiar with all groups? All facets of society should not be put under a microscope like this. Hands clammy? Well sound like Dawson is under stress and depending on Dawson’s wealth level, time to head to the RLD or the middle level venues if not too stressed . . .

We’re more comfortable with sex on TV…but should we plug the filth flood before it’s too late? – There is no filth flood, Dawson has been looking at the wrong channel too long IMHO.

Several women were sexually assaulted on Thursday during festivities to mark a local water festival in the island province of Hainan, according to eyewitnesses.

Around 8:30 am, several men tried to touch some women’s breasts, tearing their clothes during celebrations in Qixian Square, Baoting Li and Miao autonomous county, a website run by Xinhua News Agency reported.

Li Min, a tourist from Wanning in Hainan who has participated in the festival for the past five years, told China Daily that four or five women were assaulted after an opening ceremony, and the attackers were taken away by police.

“There were more than 1,000 people on the square playing with water at that time, and most of them were very young,” he said, adding that he was standing on the second floor of a building overlooking the square.

“I saw a man take off a young woman’s clothes, while similar situations also happened to four or five other women who were playing with water in different areas of the square at the same time.

“Later, police came to restore order, taking the men out of the square,” Li said, adding that he couldn’t tell how many men were taken into custody.

Huang Dingyi, from Haikou, capital of Hainan, who also witnessed the incident, said he saw a woman being molested by a man wearing a hat and a red scarf.

“The woman slipped when she was attacked by the man and she hit the attacker with a water pot,” he said. “The police rushed to stop the disorder from a house on the square and seized the man, who was in his 20s.”

On Thursday afternoon, media and netizens published photos of the festival celebrations on micro blogs.

A publicity officer for the county, who did not want to be identified, confirmed the incidents but said only one teenage girl had been sexually assaulted.

Some witnesses might have been mistaken about what they saw, according to the officer.

“It might be the carelessness of the girl wearing a vest playing with the water,” he said, adding the real situation was not as serious as netizens described.

In addition, Wang Xiumei, head of the county’s publicity department, said the public security bureau has been investigating the case and trying to determine how many women were attacked.

“We are paying attention to the case and will disclose the number and newest information as soon as possible,” she added.

On the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, China’s traditional day for lovers, Li and Miao ethnic groups offer water sacrifices, which has led to locals organizing a festival to attract tourists and residents to play with water.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

No need to get police involved, rather have official ‘car wash’ type girls specifically to draw attention for these cheap thrill types. Do put notices stating clearly that no stripping of regular citizens is allowed and that only the ‘Water Show Girls’ are to be stripped and that charges can be pressed if regular citizens are stripped or manhandled or attacked.

Iran’s Supreme Leader has ordered the country’s Revolutionary Guards to intensify its campaign of terror attacks against the West and its allies in retaliation for supporting the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

According to Western intelligence officials, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave the order to the elite Quds Force unit following a recent emergency meeting of Iran’s National Security Council in Tehran held to discuss a specially-commissioned report into the implications for Iran of the Assad regime’s overthrow.

Damascus is Iran’s most important regional ally, and the survival of the Assad regime is regarded as vital to sustaining the Iranian-backed Hizbollah militia which controls southern Lebanon.

The report, which was personally commissioned by Mr Khamenei, concluded that Iran’s national interests were being threatened by a combination of the U.N. sanctions imposed over Iran’s nuclear programme and the West’s continuing support for Syrian opposition groups attempting to overthrow the Syrian government.

Intelligence officials say the report concludes that Iran “cannot be passive” to the new threats posed to its national security, and warns that Western support for Syrian opposition groups was placing Iran’s “resistance alliance” in jeopardy, and could seriously disrupt Iran’s access to Hizbollah in Lebanon.

It advised that the Iranian regime should demonstrate to the West that there were “red lines” over what it would accept in Syria, and that a warning should be sent to “America, the Zionists, Britain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others that they cannot act with impunity in Syria and elsewhere in the region.”

Mr Khamenei responded by issuing a directive to Qassem Suleimani, the Quds Force commander, to intensify attacks against the West and its allies around the world.

The Quds Force has recently been implicated in a series of terror attacks against Western targets. Last year U.S. officials implicated the organisation in a failed assassination attempt against the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington. It was also implicated in three bomb attacks against Israeli diplomats in February, planning to attack the Eurovision song contest in Azerbaijan while two Iranians were arrested in Kenya last month for possessing explosives.

Intelligence officials believe the recent spate of Iranian attacks has been carried out by the Quds Force’s Unit 400, which runs special overseas operations.

“Unit 400 seems to have been involved in all the recent Iranian terrorist operations,” said a senior Western intelligence official. “The Iranian regime now seems determined to retaliate for what they regard as the West’s attempts to influence the outcome of the Syrian unrest.”

Iran has been actively supporting the Assad regime’s attempts to suppress the wave of anti-government protests that erupted in March last year. Iranian opposition groups claim teams of experienced Revolutionary Guard officers have been flying to Damascus on specially-chartered Iranian aircraft on a weekly basis to advise the Assad regime.

The extent of Iran’s support for the Assad regime was exposed earlier this month when 48 Iranians were captured and taken hostage by Syrian opposition fighters. The Iranians, who are said to include senior Revolutionary Guard officers, claimed they were conducting “reconnaissance missions”,

and their capture by Syrian opposition fighters was deeply embarrassing for Tehran, which is demanding their immediate safe return to Iran. Syrian rebels have threatened to kill the hostages unless Iran ends its support for the Assad regime.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Do not target civilians as only cowards will do that. Jailbreaks though would be nice and almost supported by locals . . .

(Reuters) – Britain has withdrawn a threat to enter Ecuador’s embassy in London to arrest WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who has taken refuge there, President Rafael Correa said on Saturday, taking the heat out of the diplomatic standoff.

“We consider this unfortunate incident over, after a grave diplomatic error by the British in which they said they would enter our embassy,” Correa said in a weekly media address.

In a statement, Ecuador’s government said it had received “a communication from the British Foreign Office which said that there was no threat to enter the embassy.”

Ecuador was furious after the British government warned it might try to seize Assange, who has been holed up in the building for more than two months trying to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over rape and sexual assault allegations.

Ecuador, which has granted the former computer hacker asylum, demanded that Britain’s threat be retracted. The latest move should improve relations between Quito and London and allow more talks on Assange’s fate to take place.

For now, however, Assange remains trapped in the embassy with British police waiting outside. Britain has said it is determined to fulfill a legal obligation to send him to Sweden.

The Washington-based Organization of American States had condemned Britain’s threat, and South American foreign ministers strongly backed Correa’s position that Britain’s warning was unacceptable and could set a dangerous precedent.

Correa says he shares Assange’s fears that if handed over to Sweden, he could then be extradited to the United States to face charges over WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication of secret U.S. cables.

U.S. and European government sources say the United States has issued no criminal charges against the WikiLeaks founder and has launched no attempt to extradite him.

Ecuador’s government says it never intended to prevent Assange from facing justice in Sweden. It has said that if he received written guarantees from Britain and Sweden that he would not be extradited to any third country then Assange would hand himself over to the Swedish authorities.

Assange, whose platinum hair and friendships with the rich and famous have helped make him a global celebrity, spoke from the embassy’s balcony last weekend, denouncing what he called a “witch hunt” by the United States against him and WikiLeaks.

(Editing by Brian Ellsworth and Mohammad Zargham)

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

How important is Assange? If Assange is VERY important in a manner that could finish off the England or what not, then the MI6 could have a group of unknown baklava wearing ‘Right Wingers’ (invent an IRA type outfit loyal to England i.e. ‘Swedish Meatball Brigade’ – of course these are tight lipped Commandos or such that never set foot among civvies), barge into the embassy in a peaceful holdup would be nice, abit of bruising or slapping for drama and PC believability, but depending on how unpleasant Ecuador has been with England . . . fully expect the same to occur in English Embassy in Ecuador though if ever the situation was reversed – in tit for tat) and drag Assange out, to deliver Assange to the nearest police station then use the ‘deniability’ issue.

This will however have everyone on their toes ‘Cold War’ style. If Assange is not important enough, then forget about Assange and stop media covering the obvious narcissist and even let the guy out on the streets. If Assange goes to Equador on his own, ‘Swedish Meatball Brigade’ can suddenly have a Right Wing Branch in Ecuador (made of incidental expats or tourists) as well who can still haul Assange to the Swedish Embassy in Ecuador for ‘rape’ charges (in what could be the most farcical trial ever in the history of humanity . . . ).

Four Orthodox Christian crosses have been chopped down in different parts of Russia. The incidents come after the Femen movement attacked a cross in Kiev to protest the sentence of the punk band Pussy Riot, who received two years in prison.

Three crosses have been taken down in the Urals’ Chelyabinsk Region, and one in the Archangelsk Region, northern Russia.

By the time police arrived at the scenes the vandals had already left. Authorities have launched an investigation into both cases.

The Arkhangelsk cross was erected in the memory of the victims of political repressions, said a local priest, Hegumen Feodosy.

He also said that in recent years the monastery, situated across the street from the cross, has seen two arson attacks and a number of other acts of vandalism.

“This comes in the context of all these incidents in recent months across the country, all this anti-church hysteria waged against our diocese, against the church authority, against everything sacred,” Hegumen Feodosy said.

Russian Human Rights Ombudsman has also strongly condemned the acts of vandalism.

“Just like all normal people, I’m outraged by the ludicrous acts of these individuals. I would hope to see these low-lifes voluntarily come in and explain the motives behind their outrageous actions,” Vladimir Lukin has told Interfax news agency. “Deliberate destruction of Christian or any other religious shrines is a bacchanalia of hatred and brutality.”

The two incidents follow a similar case when the leader of the Ukrainian activist group Femen took down a cross in Kiev using a chainsaw. The act, which was filmed and photographed, later received wide circulation on the Web.

In a statement Femen declared that the cross was taken down in solidarity with the members of punk band Pussy Riot, who were sentenced to two years in jail for hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Much like loudspeakers and Muslim prayers 5 times daily can offend, there is a neutral spaces issue that can anger. Are the crosses placed in a way that disenfranchise other faiths?

ARTICLE 9

Student Debt as a Moral Issue – Posted on August 26, 2012 – By Noam Shpancer

A few months ago I took several of my students to a conference in Chicago. Many of my students come from small towns in Ohio. Many have never been to a big city. Many have never left Ohio, never been on a plane before. It was thus particularly rewarding to chaperone them and witness their excitement and joy as they experienced the Second City.

One evening, strolling down Michigan Ave, the conversation turned to money. I casually asked my students about their loan burden. One of them, a perky senior psychology major planning to get her Masters and become a social worker, said she had $80,000 in student loan debt. I was shocked.

Now, I am not entirely naïve about the problem of student loan debt. Until this year, I had one myself. A university degree is still—and perhaps more than before—the passport to the American middle class life.

Demand for education is high, classroom seats in good schools are in limited supply, and so prices tend to go up. Tuition rate hikes routinely outpace inflation. Thus, students are pushed into larger debts. According to the NY Times, the average student loan debt in the US topped $23,000 last year. Much has been written recently about the attendant economic and social hazards. A debt of $23,000 is a troubling burden, for students and parents.

But a debt of $80,000 is something else entirely.

You can perhaps make a case that debt of this magnitude is justified in some unique cases—such as in the process of obtaining a highly valuable degree from a top notch institution. Some professions pay very well. And Ivy League degrees practically guarantee higher starting salaries. But in this particular context—in my reality and that of my students—such a debt is simply not justifiable.

The difference between 23k and 80k debt is a bit like the difference between drinking and driving drunk. If I see a student of mine drinking beer, I may feel uneasy, or worried. I may even say something about responsibility. But if I see a drunken student get behind the wheel, I’m obligated to intervene. An $80,000 debt, for my students, is akin to getting behind the wheel while plastered. it is a recipe for disaster.

Like most private liberal arts institutions, my university prides itself on nurturing students. Many formal systems and procedures are in place to identify and address potential problems and pitfalls students may encounter as they pursue their degrees. We track student attendance, we track their grades, we advise them on which courses to take so as to stay on track toward graduation; we make sure they take the right load—that they don’t over-burden themselves.

There is a medical clinic on campus, as well as career counselors at the ready and free psychotherapy sessions. There are writing labs and tutors and study groups and remedial classes for those who are academically behind, or unprepared. There are assorted advocacy and support group and myriad religious activities.

There are social clubs and Greek organizations and many opportunities set up to help students find company, identity, a sense of belonging; we’re trying to take care of them while they learn the tools that will facilitate their ascent in the world.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Education is a trick by ‘elites’ to get middle class people indebted (also job fair hype), so that the middle class can be turned into the poor. Most large businesses or multi-corps are already owned by elites, so all middles who do not think like, or think for the benefit of elites, or who are too independent and rebellious, or likely to take civilisation beyond the plutocrat-masses-capitalist paradigm of the 20th/21st century, will be prevented from getting jobs, negatively socialised, demogogued against, and turned into ‘the poor’. The poor will be too poor to run for election or have enough energy to think critically, and the threat to the elites from the middles end in this way. Democracy ends when people fail to recognize that plutocrats or term limitless politicians or nepotists try to control the political arena. So will the 99% please vote only for the non-plutocrat or non-nepotists or non-GLC contractors or plutocrats, and eventually vote Joe Publics into power to ensure unused land distribution as discussed throughout this blog, as well as wealth distribution with Socialist limits eventually.

Rise in fees is excluding children of average-earners
Dr Martin Stephen say private schools are putting themselves in danger

Private schools have put themselves in danger warns Dr Martin Stephen

Thousands of middle-income families have been priced out of private schools by inflation-busting fee rises.

Average fees have risen at nearly twice the rate of inflation over the past ten years.

The increases mean that private schooling is now beyond average earners in well-paid occupations, including pharmacists, architects, IT experts, engineers and scientists.

A decade ago, these professionals would have been able to afford to pay fees out of earned income.

Now, however, they would struggle without funding from other sources, according to the study.

The average annual fee for a day pupil at a private school is £11,457, up from £6,820 in 2002, researchers found. Charges have risen 68 per cent in that period, 1.8 times faster than retail price inflation over the same period, which was up 37 per cent.

Private school fees are considered affordable if they account for 25 per cent or less of the average annual full-time salary before tax.

But £11,457 represents 35 per cent of this average, which stands at £33,011, according to the study by Lloyds TSB Private Banking. In 2002, fees would have taken 27 per cent.

Tuition fee rise HAS turned thousands of middle class students off going to university
It’s catastrophic for students, abused by profiteering exam, boards and blindly discriminates against boys. We bust me bold… and put the GCSE out of its misery
Exam regulator to look into GCSE gradings after headteachers threaten legal action

Suren Thiru, economist at the bank, said the rises make it ‘increasingly difficult for the average worker in many occupations to afford a private education for their offspring’.

Those who can most easily afford the fees include accountants, senior police officers, airline pilots and production managers as fees represent 19 per cent of their annual earnings.

Excluded: The rise in fees for private education means that average earners can no longer afford independent schooling for their children

The findings follow a warning this year from the former head of a top private school that the sector is losing public confidence by becoming the preserve of the super-rich.

Dr Martin Stephen, formerly of St Paul’s School, West London wrote: ‘Independent schools have put themselves in a very dangerous position; even more dangerous because they don’t realise the danger.

‘They are pricing themselves out of the reach of most normal people in the UK. The independent sector is becoming socially exclusive in a way not seen since Victorian times.’

Dr Stephen is now director of education at GEMS, an international schools group aiming to make private education ‘affordable’.

He added: ‘The sector has become too dependent on overseas parents and is profiting from a state sector in some turmoil as a result of radical change. Independents need to realign themselves with their clients.’

The biggest rises in fees have been in London and the South West, both up 79 per cent from 2002-12. Next were East Anglia (74 per cent) and the East Midlands and South East, both at just under 70 per cent.

The number of pupils enrolled at private schools has also fallen over the decade, according to the study.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Fee price as well as goods price increases need to be monitored by government and prevented from being more than inflation rate. To ensure exclusivity, use the CLASS paradigm or requirement (i.e. the job the parent was working at determines if a private school wants to take them in), also CRIMINAL RECORD or at extreme levels ETHICAL requirements, instead of the wealth only paradigm. Not all wealthy are classy folks (even the titled have been stealing tax funds from so many cases in England), and not all poor are unsuitable or lack the high mindedness for exclusive education. For lack of a better method of retaining exclusivity, the private college has lost all ethics to become money spinners and mere businesses rather than educational or social bastions. Education now, is a farce.

Public school fees could be on a flat 10% of earnings basis regardless of whatever the parent is earning. Private school fees could be on a flat 20% of earnings basis regardless of whatever the parent is earning.

This way all social classes are able to participate after criminal record or background checks so long as they sacrifice 20% of the monthly salaries. This would make entrances on quality possible for everyone, not equate wealth with quality and create a low quality plutocracy and a worship of wealth as the basis of a society and nation and unending increases in education fees which should be free, being a basic necessity.

Police said the death of Tao Wei, China Central Television’s famous soccer commentator, was not suspicious, people.com reports.

The body of the 34-year-old was discovered in a room at the Nishihaitai Hotel in Jinan, Shandong province at 9 am on Monday after he failed to meet friends for breakfast that morning.

He was staying at the hotel for one night with three friends before continuing their journey to Qingdao.

Local police say Tao’s body showed no signs of injury. There was no sign of any disturbance in the room, and the hotel room window and door was in good condition.

Tao’s coworkers at CCTV say he was a hardworking and modest person who has a good reputation among colleagues and maintained a healthy lifestyle, according to Beijing News.

Tao was a soccer player for more than a decade before becoming a soccer commentator for CCTV. He also owned a soccer club in Beijing.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

. . . also owned a soccer club in Beijing . . . – This is the main cause for certain. ALL soccer clubs have links to gambling and the underworld. Not so surprising. Actaully all sports related people and industry players are nominally affected by gambling as well. Sports is driven to a great degree by gambling and hence the underworld, especially for those out of University level age or even career sportsmen. Look at the milder eating/fatness oriented Sumo for example which was riddled with underworld allegations. Football is far deeper enmired. The best is to legalize gambling at football stadiums much like gambling at horse races. No point keeping up pretenses. Bad debts can occur and Taowei being an owner doubtless was involved.

Who knows Taowei was conducting a sting for CCTV, if not involved in a criminal manner that might lead to certain individuals being targeted for questioning and would ‘squeal’. Had to be killed then. But worse still, the police could well have had their own informers and killed Taowei in a counter-sting operation – i.e. ‘death not suspicious’. Just legalize football gambling to prevent this sort of case from occurring. People love to gamble though limits on losses should be clearly marked like 30% of salary level at most (or 30% of lifetime asset at most) before being barred from gambling. Even the underworld would prefer to be legal so why make all these pretenses? Much like prohibition in the USA for alcohol, this is gambling prohibition in China.

ARTICLE 12

Kim Kardashian settles lawsuit with Old Navy after label used a lookalike in ad – by Daily Mail Reporter UPDATED: 19:59 GMT, 29 August 2012

Kim Kardashian has settled a lawsuit against Old Navy claiming the clothing retailer violated her publicity rights by using a lookalike in an ad.

The reality TV star, 31, sued over the spot in July 2011, claiming the company’s use of a model who looked like her might confuse consumers about her actual endorsements, which include a clothing store and shoe line.

No details about the settlement were filed with the court.

Spot the difference: Kim Kardashian, left, settled a lawsuit against Old Navy claiming the clothing retailer violated her publicity rights by using lookalike Melissa Molinaro in an ad who is rumoured to be dating Reggie Bush.

‘The lawsuit was resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties,’ said the reality TV starlet’s lawyer Gary Hecker, who declined to elaborate.

A spokesperson for Old Navy parent company The Gap Inc. was not immediately available.

The lawsuit was over the commercial titled ‘Super C-U-T-E.’

The ad began airing in February 2011 and was still being used in some of the company’s promotions months later, Kardashian’s lawsuit stated.

It featured Canadian singer-model Melissa Molinaro, who an attorney for Old Navy said at a January hearing was famous in her own right.

Doppelgänger: In the advertisement, Molinaro hair and make-up is styled almost identically to Kim’s

Molinaro was said to be dating Kardashian’s ex boyfriend Reggie Bush at the time.

But the retailer maintained her appearance in the ad wasn’t intended to draw similarities to Kardashian.

Hecker contended that some news outlets and Twitter users noted similarities in the women’s appearances.

Kardashian was seeking unspecified damages – believed to be in the region of $15 – $20 million and an order barring Old Navy from using a lookalike model again.

Seem familiar? Molinaro even tries her hand at a signature Kim ‘look over the shoulder’ pose

Plenty in common: Model and actress Molinaro was also linked to Kim’s ex Reggie Bush

Last year Molinaro said she was thrilled to be compared to Kardashian, describing it as an ‘amazing compliment.’

She had previously been a competitor on the Pussycat Dolls Presents: The Search For The Next Doll and also P. Diddy’s hit show Making The Band, where she just missed out on becoming part of now defunct female group, Danity Kane.

Melissa also scored a major role in the dance/romance film ‘Honey 2’, the follow up to Jessica Alba’s original flick, Honey, but it went straight to DVD in the U.S.

She had also released her debut single and video Dance Floor, where she is seen prancing around and posing in an array of leotards and skimpy bathing suits that show off a rounded derrière, similar to Kim’s.

Who would actually think that would be Kim K singing/dancing? Remember…. she has no talent.

– Jessica, Dallas, Texas, 30/8/2012 04:19
Rating 106

Is she going to sue the model for looking like her too?? Stupid, self-obsessed woman. I don’t think I’m alone in wishing she would just disappear.

– lauren, lala land, 30/8/2012 03:14
Rating 98

I want my girl Nicole Scherzinger to sue Kim for infringing on her look and publicity rights as well! That girl does not look THAT much like Kim and anyone who thought it was Kim in the ads must be pretty silly. Besides if Kim so much as passes gas she let’s the world know, surely people would not question if she had an endorsement deal with Old Navy-they’d know it already. Sounds like she only did this because the girl was dating Reggie, the love of Kim’s life. Kim will do anything for money as well. She is the worst type of person you could ever imagine. What a shame that Old Navy would settle this with her. Disgusting.

– LOL SMH, LA, USA, 30/8/2012 02:46
Rating 41

What UTTER nonsense!!! She obviously sued because that girl is prettier! Is she going to sue everyone who wears their hair like that on TV? A style that’s before she ever ‘arrived’. What utter nonsense. I really hate that woman.

– Greg, Belfast Norn Iron, 30/8/2012 02:19
Rating 40

Ha Ha, So we have a nobody that thinks she is somebody and a nobody trying be the nobody that thinks she is somebody, Never knowingly undersold, you can’t make this stuff up.

– Rapidlaser, London UK, 30/8/2012 01:59
Rating 23

So that girl can’t model for anyone because she looks too like Kim? Sounds a bit unfair.

– alwayshocked, Ireland, 30/8/2012 01:47
Rating 89

Get a life Kim.

– Hasan, London, UK, 30/8/2012 01:34
Rating 60

I think she looks more like Eva Longoria. Did Eva sue as well? Actually I have a friend who also has long brown hair. I should tell her to sue old navy for having the audacity to hire an actress who resembles her.

– Cassie, Wyoming, 30/8/2012 01:29
Rating 53

“…a rounded derrière, similar to Kim’s.” Let’s get real – any similarity between them ends at the ass line.

– Kingfish, Atlanta, USA, 30/8/2012 01:26
Rating 33

this women is so full of it!! Does she seriously think every women with long dark hair and brown eyes is trying to imitate her pathetic!!

– Mrs B, buckinghamshire, 30/8/2012 01:06

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Molinaro even tries her hand at a signature Kim ‘look over the shoulder’ pose. NO. There is no such thing as a signature pose. The human body has limited poses. No combination can fairly be considered ‘signature’.

This is almost Old Navy admitting to wanting to use a Kim Kardashian lookalike. However that Molinaro model could well present herself to ANY company to want to market their goods and a company that accepts that offer would be absolved of this form of infringement. A company cannot specifically seek a Kim Kardashian lookalike, BUT a Kim Kardashian lookalike could seek ANY company for promotion of themselves, NOT specifically as Kim Kardashian BUT as themselves.

You see lookalikes have as much right to a certain look as the first person who looks that way who was promoted. If Old Navy managed to sustain ‘deniability’ sufficiently, they could countersue for anti-monopoly issues and modelling industry ‘Fair Opportunity’ laws. Sort of like Kim Kardashian demanding a monopoly on ALL people who look like her, which suppress the opportunity of all lookalikes from having a viable modelling career which is obviously illegal.

Either Old Navy had the intent and owned up, or just wasn’t steady on their feet in thinking through on the anti-monopoly issue. This is where foreign advertising companies who never heard of such and such ‘stars’ could be employed for ‘deniability’, so long as intent is not traced back. If coincidences occur there still is no case then. Melissa Molinaro incidentally could counter sue Kim Kardashian for preventing her from having a modelling career with Old Navy if they have the stomach and CORRECT sense of indignation to re-open up the case, not for money but an apology that will set precedents for case studies in law.

Nick Clegg last night demanded a swingeing new tax on the rich to help ease the financial squeeze being suffered by the less well-off as austerity measures bite.

The Deputy Prime Minister said Britain’s wealthiest should be made to contribute more to the ‘economic war’, which has been made worse by the double-dip recession.

He said an extra ‘time-limited contribution’ from the rich would be seen as fair given the scale of Britain’s financial problems.

Without it, he suggested, Britain could suffer a breakdown in ‘social cohesion’ as seen during last summer’s riots.

Calls for a new tax to soak the rich are likely to antagonise the Tory Right, who argue that cutting taxes is the best way to boost growth and persuade the well-off to pay more.

The Liberal Democrat leader gave little indication of where he thought the new tax should be levied, although he suggested it would be in addition to the party’s existing proposal to levy an annual ‘mansion tax’ on homes worth more than £2million.

In an interview with the Guardian he said the prolonged nature of the battle to tackle the deficit left by Labour called for exceptional measures.

He said: ‘If we want to remain cohesive and prosperous as a society, people of very considerable personal wealth have got to make a bit of an extra contribution.

‘In addition to our standing policy on things like the mansion tax is there a time limited contribution you can ask in some way or another from people of considerable wealth so they feel they are making a contribution to the national effort?

Return of the Laws: Mr Clegg says he wants disgraced David Laws back in Government despite Mr Laws resignation over his expenses

‘What we are embarked on is in some senses a longer economic war rather than a short economic battle.’

Mr Clegg said it was vital for the Government to ‘really hard-wire fairness into what we do in the next phases of fiscal restraint’. He added: ‘If we don’t do that I don’t think the process will be either socially or politically sustainable or acceptable.’

This morning, Susan Kramer, the Lib Dem treasury spokesman in the House of Lords, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘We can’t give a free ride to people. If we’re going to be a coherent society everyone has to carry a share of it.’

She added: ‘At the very upper end income tax probably doesn’t work effectively… a wealth tax is a very interesting way to go.’

In a gloomy assessment, Mr Clegg said it was now clear that what once appeared to be a ‘short, sharp economic battle’ was ‘clearly turning into a longer term process of economic recovery and fiscal restraint’.

He said this would involve ‘sacrifices over a longer period of time, a longer period of belt tightening as a country’ – making it essential that the rich are seen to be playing their part.

Mr Clegg said details of his new tax proposals would be unveiled at next month’s Lib Dem conference.
Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems have refused to support David Cameron’s proposed boundary changes following the collapse of the Government¿s plans for Lords reform

Forced vote: Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems have refused to support David Cameron’s proposed boundary changes following the collapse of the Lords reform

He suggested the tax was likely to target ‘very high asset wealth’. Changes to the top rate of income tax have been all but ruled out following the Coalition’s controversial decision to reduce it from 50p to 45p earlier this year.

Mr Clegg also gave the strongest hint yet that David Laws is set to return to Government in the forthcoming reshuffle.

Mr Laws was forced to quit his post as Treasury Chief Secretary after less than a month following revelations about his expenses.

But he has continued as an informal adviser to Mr Clegg, particularly on economic matters and is now tipped to return as a minister in the Cabinet Office.

Mr Clegg said: ‘I have never made any secret of the fact that I want to see David Laws back in Government.’

Mr Clegg also urged David Cameron to force a vote on proposed boundary changes, which the Lib Dems have refused to support following the collapse of the Government’s plans for Lords reform.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Lets see which MPs are part of the problem that refuse to ratify this Wealth Tax bill. A person earning 1+ million annually should be subject to 80% taxes IMHO. That would mean 200K a year earnings which 99% of the population will not likely achieve given the sluggish jobs growth and England’s lack of positioning on any major trade routes. How many people earn 16,000+ a month (i.e. 200K a year) in England anyway? Wealth distribution otherwise cannot occur. A person earning 10+ million annually should be subject to 90% taxes. That would mean 1M a year earnings which is well beyond most of the WORLD. How many people earn 80,000+ a month in England anyway? So think wealth tax for redistribution of wealth. All that sequestered wealth is not going to make 99% lives better, so might as well tax, then redistribute for healthcare or education and perhaps more council housing for the poor or other cost absorbing initiatives like free power and water or even staples – courtesy of your fat cat plutocrat millions earning types . . . good one Clegg, so who’s going to set up a another series of riots to make sure the 1% understand that the Wealth Tax is for the good of everyone if convincing the corrupted crony Capitalist colluders in Parliament won’t work?

After shooting to fame on Sex, Lies and Rinsing Guys, it’s fair to say Danica Thrall knows how to manipulate men to get her own way.

But now her flirtatious behaviour has landed her in hot water in the Celebrity Big Brother house yet again as she faces eviction for a second time.

The 24-year-old beauty was slammed by her housemates for causing a ‘love triangle’ between former pals Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino and Prince Lorenzo Borghese.

Emotional: Danica Thrall burst into tears as she confronted Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino about nominating her for a second time

And she was forced to listen to every word of their criticism as Big Brother ordered the group to make their nominations in front of each other yet again.

Before the contestants even took to the sofas to deliver their verdict, Martin Kemp admitted he had been shocked by the glamour girl’s behaviour in the ‘Gods and Mortals’ task, explaining she had been ‘teasing’ both The Situation and Prince Lorenzo.

Speaking in the Diary Room, he said: ‘The whole argument between Danica and The Situation has been caused by Danica’s bed-hopping. She teases those boys.
‘It’s disgraceful’: MC Harvey fumed about Danica’s behaviour to Prince Lorenzo following the nominations

‘They think they can snog her. Danica led Lorenzo to the point where I thought he was going to propose. She knows what she’s doing and she’s very good at it.’

But worse was yet to come when Danica’s fellow housemates slammed her behaviour in front of her.

MC Harvey said: ‘I’m sick of this love triangle situation, and I think she was one of the main causes of The Situation and Lorenzo becoming distant when they used to be friends.’

And the beauty was shocked when The Situation turned against her for a second time, saying: ‘Danica uses my emotions against Prince. Although I do care about her, let’s see how the public feels.’

Upsetting: The housemates were forced to make their nominations in front of each other yet again

Meanwhile, Samantha Brick added: ‘We’ve got very different views on how you treat and respect men.’

Danica was left in tears at the end of the nominations and decided to confront The Situation on why he had put her up for eviction again.

‘I would never have done that to you. Never,’ she said. ‘I thought out of everyone I could rely on you, like I said I could.’

Upset: Danica looked on as she was nominated by Ashley, Harvey, Julie, Samantha and The Situation

But the Jersey Shore star claimed his decision was tactical, saying: ‘I practically love you, but I know you have a boyfriend.’

And Danica’s actions caused a further divide between the group when Prince Lorenzo attempted to stand up for her against MC Harvey.

However, the rapper immediately hit back in a scathing attack, suggesting the model’s behaviour has been ‘disgraceful’.
‘I’m sick of this love triangle’: The Celebrity Big Brother housemates fumed that they were fed up of the model’s incessant flirting

‘I’m sick of this love triangle’: The Celebrity Big Brother housemates fumed that they were fed up of the model’s incessant flirting

‘National treasure’: Coleen admitted to Big Brother that she had previously been afraid of nominating Julie

I nearly chocked on my horlicks when Coleen referred to Julie Goodyear as being a national treasure, that gum chewing trouble maker is everything but.

– Kal, Manchester, 31/8/2012 07:39
Rating 2

MC Harvey is a nasty piece of work and not nice to women – Danica is right; he is a bully and a ring leader. Ashley is a stupid but nasty little boy too with no respect for women. Julie Goodyear is a disgrace. I don’t respect Danica’s career but she is not insincere – she is a very honest woman – I like her!

– laura, oxford, 31/8/2012 07:36
Rating (0)

Harvey you numpty you can’t talk about Danica after what you did to Alisha. While all you eejits are looking and hating on Danica the one you should be watching is Julie ‘clacking gum’ Goodyear she’s the silent assassin. Mike the walking ego is playing a great game knowing he’s got the house’s sympathy over Danica he’s playing it for all it’s worth. Prince Lorenzo is a sweetie but hardly stupid. Relationships formed in these situations are doomed before they start. Danica is flirting BUT hardly crime of the century… Unless you’re Mike who doesn’t like not having her 24/7 to himself. I don’t want Danica to leave I think Sam should go she’s boring

– Oxfordshire Annie, UK, 31/8/2012 07:27
Rating (0)

Even though she has faults Danica is so pretty – islingtongrl, Renfrew Scotland, 31/8/2012 03:43 ———————————————————————————- What a sad little comment that is! She’s ugly on the inside, no one knows who the real Danica is. Being pretty will only get you so far and eventually it will lead to trouble, hope she’s prepared for it. As a man i acknowledge she’s pretty, but some men can see through the lipstick and flirty hair playing. She’s a little tramp and i hope in future a real strong powerful man destroys her emotionally and morally!

– Robert, Liverpool, 31/8/2012 07:26
Rating 1

Please, please please vote to keep the lovely Julian in. He’s a lovely and genuine person and deserves to win. Martin Kemp second. As for Julie, well, what a vile, foul mouthed back stabber she is!

– jane, south coast, 31/8/2012 07:22
Rating 3

Harvey – You are a vile Hypocrite, and that is 10 time worse than Danica!!!

– RJ, London, 31/8/2012 07:20
Rating 1

Danika is a vile woman.

– only me, Bedford, 31/8/2012 07:13
Rating 1

My my, aren’t we all judgemental. I’m sure nobody commenting here has ever done anything others wouldnt approve of. I’m not a big fan of her behaviour in the house (or at leastbwhat C5 have chosen to show us), but I think she had a point last night. The boys have formed a nasty gang against her. For my money, she’s just a silly girl. The real nasty piece of work is Julie. What a malevolent crow. She is playing every single one of the housemates for fools. She is the true villain of the piece, not sideshow Danica.

– Miffster’s Mum, Nowhere, 31/8/2012 07:10
Rating (0)

Can not stand Danica! Spoilt madam!

– nicole, London, 31/8/2012 07:06

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Is this Danica even a real person? Lets pretend if not because the issue is quite interesting . . . Danika could make a fortune TEACHING others to use that mojo as she does (uncontrolled mojo btw leads to rapes of even Burkha clad women, even though their eyes cannot even be seen, a man though can sense the ‘spirit’ of such women and get excited – so the chips fall in trhe Middle East . . . Danika however actually IS in control!).

Don’t condemn and put Danika in proper perspective and context. Danica could change the sex lives of the ‘untrained’ FOREVER perhaps via some seminars or what not! This is talent and must not be blunted by attacks like this. Maybe not suitable for some reality shows or some social situations, but must not be lost or weakened! Danika could in fact create a renaissancxe in sex positivism as well as overhaul the henpecked feminazi manipulated psychiatric establishment and nridge the alpha male group to mainstream society!

Danika sound like beyond mere sex, but can be the MIND OF SEX. Just immature and needs proper context (reality TV is no context for anything btw, just aggravation and lots of poseurs bullying those watching unawares, or if not ‘their own size/skill’.). Freud style genius in the making here, though not for the lower classes, this is a high society skill to be propagated! Incessant flirting is only so in the podunk village Danika comes from, that is probably peopled with retards, so when finally in the limelight Danika goes into overdrive and makes everyone feel threatened . . . Danika should find or create that niche for what she does so well! Don’t miss this comment!

ARTICLE 15

Hordes of randy Republicans were expected to be a boon for Tampa’s Sunshine State many strips clubs, but owners and dancers are still waiting for their RNC stimulus package – by Rich Schapiro / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS – Thursday, August 30, 2012, 6:05 AM

Scantily-clad beauties perform at Mons Venus strip club in Tampa on Tuesday. Strippers were promised a booming business with the Republican National Convention in town, but so far it’s been a bust.

TAMPA — The wildly anticipated Republican nudie-bar bonanza has turned out to be a double D-sized bust.

Strippers across this mammary mecca were anticipating an orgy of business this week from the crush of conventioneers.

Instead, three days into the RNC, Tampa’s dancing beauties were still waiting for their stimulus packages.

“My friend told me I’d make $3,000 a night this week,” said a slinky brunette named Jordan, as she gazed dejectedly around an empty Mons Venus bar on Monday, the Isaac washout day in Tampa. “I’ve made $100 tonight and it’s already 3 a.m.”

“I don’t even know what I’m still doing here,” she added. “This sucks.”

Don’t even know what ‘I’m’ still doing here? Don’t be ungrateful! Just look at the jobless GRADUATES who owe the ‘Education-Financiar-Complex’ while interest piles up. Lucky to be earning so much in such nice conditions!

OUR TEAM IN TAMPA REPORTS LIVE FROM THE RNC

The scene was no different at 2001 Odyssey, located just across the street, where some strippers were dealing with their own personal deficit crises.

A dancer named Sicily said she was actually down more than $100 after working Friday, Sunday and Tuesday. Strippers at 2001 Odyssey pay a stage fee every night — and Sicily said the club raised it from $50 to $100 this week.

“I wish I was going home with one dollar in my pocket,” Sicily said. “That’s sad.”

Warren Colazzo, owner of Thee Dollhouse, had predicted that the convention haul would triple the cash brought in during previous Super Bowls hosted in Tampa.

But between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. Wednesday, his sleek club drew only one extremely drunk conventioneer in an ill-fitting suit who was seen being reprimanded by a burly security guard.

A pair of cocktail waitresses, in skin-tight American flag corsets and barely-there blue thongs, looked bored.

Asked how her week has been, Karen Kennard, an ample-chested blonde, broke into a pained smile.

“Hashtag 2012 RNC money myth,” quipped Kennard. “I’ve worked four Super Bowls. I was hoping to be inundated financially in Super Bowl proportions, but it definitely hasn’t happened yet.”

Not all of the delegates have acted like choir boys, of course. A smattering of randy Republicans have mixed canoodling with conventioneering.

A portly delegate in a white button-down shirt and khaki pants showed up at 2001 Odyssey Monday night still wearing his convention credentials.

Every five minutes or so, he disappeared into a back room to get a lap dance.

“That guy can’t get enough,” one stripper remarked.

An hour or so later, a politico in a blue blazer emerged from the private VIP area tailed closely by a busty brunette. He made a beeline for the club’s ATM machine and pulled out $400 before walking back out, his hand on the small of her back.

Monica Fox, a stripper at Mons Venus, said a pair of GOP bigwigs stopped by Monday afternoon — and one of them treated her like royalty.

“He had money, and he had no problem spending it,” Fox said.

But she was one of the very lucky ones. At 4 a.m. Wednesday, a heavily tattooed stripper named Anna surveyed the scene at 2001 Odyssey — where a gaggle of girls were jostling for the attention of three guys in suits — and offered her take on why business was so bad.

“To be honest, I think a lot of them just hired escorts,” she said. “That’s more their style.”

See how Tampa strip clubs prepared for the RNC in this video report

rschapiro@nydailynews.com

Craig Warga/New York Daily News

Dancers at Mons Venus strip club in Tampa told The News that business has been terrible.

At 100 per night, 2-3K a month is quite fair! This is relaxing half day shift of 4 hours at most, to just prance around a pole, get some exercise, or get groped and pawed abit! Look at all those degree holding debt ridden graduates who earn nothing for years! Remember to put some aside for your retirement girls! Education should be free, and even then there might be no takers for education!

The Rev. Benedict Groeschel, a New York priest, is apologizing following criticism he’s receiving for saying that priests accused of child sex abuse are often seduced by their accusers and that a first-time offender shouldn’t go to jail.

NEW YORK — A New York priest apologized Thursday after coming under criticism for saying that priests accused of child sex abuse are often seduced by their accusers and that a first-time offender should not go to jail.

The Rev. Benedict Groeschel of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal made the comments in an interview with the National Catholic Register published this week. The website for the conservative independent Register then removed the story and posted an apology for publishing the comments. Groeschel and the friars did as well.

Asked about working with priests involved in abuse, Groeschel said, “Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster – 14, 16, 18 – is the seducer.”

In expanding on his answer, Groeschel also referenced Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State coach convicted of sexually abusing boys, referring to Sandusky as “this poor guy” and wondering why no one said anything for years.

He also added later that anyone involved “on their first offense, they should not go to jail because their intention was not committing a crime.”

Editor in Chief Jeanette De Melo posted a note apologizing for “publishing without clarification or challenge Father Benedict Groeschel’s comments that seem to suggest that the child is somehow responsible for abuse. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our publication of that comment was an editorial mistake, for which we sincerely apologize.”

Groeschel also posted an apology to the site. “I did not intend to blame the victim. A priest (or anyone else) who abuses a minor is always wrong and is always responsible. My mind and my way of expressing myself are not as clear as they used to be. I have spent my life trying to help others the best that I could. I deeply regret any harm I have caused to anyone,” he said.

The friars expressed regret for the remarks and highlighted Groeschel’s medical history. They said he had been in a car accident several years ago, and that “in recent months his health, memory and cognitive ability have been failing.” They described the comments as “out of character.”

The Archdiocese of New York repudiated the comments in a statement posted on its website, calling them “simply wrong.”

“Although he is not a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, what Father Groeschel said cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. The sexual abuse of a minor is a crime, and whoever commits that crime deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” spokesman Joseph Zwilling said.

Groeschel is not a priest with the Archdiocese in any specific parish but has worked with it in the past. He helped start the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in 1987. He hosts a weekly show, “Sunday Night Prime,” on EWTN, the Catholic television network.

Deacon Bernard Nojadera, executive director of the Secretariat of Child and Youth Protection of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said, “There is never a time when you can blame a minor who is sexually assaulted for the crime perpetrated upon him or her. The responsibility is always with the adult. Sexual abuse of a minor is abhorrent and indefensible. It is especially heinous when the abuse is perpetrated by a cleric.”

David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, said there needs to be consequences for figures like Groeschel, “who say incredibly hurtful and mean-spirited things.”

Comments like Groeschel’s “discourage victims, witnesses and whistleblowers from reporting horrific crimes both known and suspected,” he said.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Another contrived NLP article? Well here’s an answer for answerings sake. This Groeschel guy is too old, mellow and tired, also too deeply socialised to think through the whys or argue. All of the above articles’ responses were not so easy to elucidate or apply immediately under the barrage of abuse the poor guy got hammered with (as per the NLP manufactured b.s. . . . of course . . . ). As mentioned, earlier, the reptillian brain and the day-to-day personality are entirely different things, and children being partially socialised can and do communicate at different levels. THAT is what Groeschel meant. Not that sexual abuse is normal, especially in consensual cases, but that everything takes 2 hands to clap. Yea for sure, the other Benedict (Arnold? Nope . . . ) needs to grow a thick shell, no amount of NLP fake articles will make child abuses go away . . . honesty is better than harbouring paedophile Catholic (or whatever denomination) Priests. Time for those overdue melons . . . no mellowing here!

George Osborne has faced calls for a flat rate of income tax. The Chancellor should introduce a flat rate of income tax and abolish levies such as national insurance, stamp duty and inheritance tax to boost the economy, experts have said. They are calling for a single income tax rate of 30 per cent and the abolition of eight major taxes, including corporation tax and air passenger duty. The 2020 Tax Commission, a joint project from the Institute of Directors and the TaxPayers’ Alliance, says the changes would lead to a tax cut of £3,400 for the average two-earner household. A 400-page report from the group concludes that the measures could lead to an 8.4 per cent increase in the UK’s gross domestic product after 15 years – the equivalent of lending £5,000 to each family.

Allister Heath, chairman of the commission, said: ‘It is time for Britain to make a vital choice between tweaking the status quo and letting our economy continue to be crippled by complex and punitive taxes, and drastically changing course with a radical but realistic plan for a tax system fit for the 21st century.’ Under the plans, both employee and employer national insurance contributions would be scrapped and replaced with a single 30 per cent rate of tax on income, with a £10,000 personal allowance.

Plans: Allister Heath, the chairman of the 2020 Tax Commission, says the current tax rate is ‘crippling’ the economy

Corporation tax and capital gains tax would be replaced with a 30 per cent tax on dividends, interest and rent, and inheritance tax and stamp taxes on land and shares would be dropped, as well as air passenger duty. Fuel duty would be cut by 5p.

Overall, taxation would be limited to a third of national income – as would public spending. The proposed flat-rate income tax would increase the budget deficit by £49.1billion in its first year if the changes were not phased in, or if there were no further cuts to public spending. However, the commission predicts that the boost to the economy would result in a £35billion fall in annual borrowing after 15 years. It says the measures would result in a tax cut of around £3,400 for a two-earner household with an income of £28,000.

¦ Collecting taxes costs as much now as it did 50 years ago, figures show. Despite technological advances, bureaucracy accounts for £1.14 of every £100 collected, compared with £1.16 in 1958. A report from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, based on data from the Paris-based Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, revealed that since 2001 the annual cost has been less than 1 per cent of tax income just once.

Commentator comments :

Is the DM stupid or what… I’d quite like to live in la-la land where tax is zippo %… There is Bob Hope, no hope and envelopes chance of the government making the average person Â£3k better off. Purely because it’s 3k they wouldn’t have!

– silvertail, midlands, 21/5/2012 12:12

Once again, a proposal to stick it to families that scrimp and save to allow one parent to stay home with the children. Traditional families are apparently evil and must be stopped. Such a statement about this country.

– anon, uk, 21/5/2012 12:11

So, a two-earner household benefits, and pensioners pay 50% more tax than at present. There seems to be a concerted effort to solve the aging problem by starving the elderly to an early death. In a few years time they will wonder why they have thousands of old people on the streets begging for coppers. Oh, but those who don’t retire until 2016 will get bigger pensions, so it’s just those of us who got caught in the middle who will suffer. Thanks a lot!

– PAJ, Sussex, 21/5/2012 12:11

Angy Anderson 11.50 Who really knows where our money goes and what it is used for. When I began work at seventeen I was told I would pay tax and national Insurance. I would be entitled to a weekly payment if I lost my job and I would receive a pension at sixty. I would also receive treatment on the NHS and dental treatment on the NHS. I am not getting a pension at sixty so the government has broken a contract with me and thousands of others like me. Tax and National Insurance is all the same, forced to pay but get little out of it.

– Mrs Iri-Tated, UK, 21/5/2012 12:11

Until the suits understand the simple concept of *sharing* things will never change.

– june, bedworth, 21/5/2012 12:08

And the rich get richer.

– Barking Mad, Lancashire, 21/5/2012 12:05

The suffering 99% should all be given a course in basic economy . Atleast their mind will not get agitated and confused when they suffer . Unless the rich and the wealthy get richer and wealthier , how can the 99% pick up more crumbs from under the table, silly ? It is for the good of the 99% only that it is important that the rich and the wealthy should become richer and wealthier . For the orderly existence of the universe we all should have an all- powerful God , for the orderly existence of the world we should have one superpower. Similarly, for the orderly existence of the superpower , we should have a 1% or even less number of the super-rich ! It’s Nature’s Law…Elementary , dear Watson!

– Zeitgeist, London , uk, 21/5/2012 12:05

Looking at the worst comments, I see a lot of people don’t understand how percentages work…

– Sres, Chorley, 21/5/2012 12:02

THis is an EXCELLENT IDEA and has been mooted more than the ONCE. THis type of scheme WORKS as the rate of tax is low enough to not AVOID or EVADE. THus everyone will pay as it is not worth avoiding. It will be easy to collect and thus we can get rid of a lot of Tax Collectors!!! This has happened in some of the Eastern Eurpoean countires and they soon found that they were running a positive budget and had to cut the rate of tax so as too not build up too much SURPLUS. It will take a TOUGH GOVERNMENT TO TAKE THE BULL BY THE HORNS and iMPLIMENT but it would be fantastic !!! LET THE PEOPLE CHOOSE HOW THEY SPEND THEIR MONEY not the fools in charge !!!!

– Tel BOY, Bromley Kent, 21/5/2012 11:58
Rating 2

Bill Crawley West Sussex. I don’t agree with the proposals but you have forgotten that you will stop paying NI contributions that are currently around 12% of earnings above £146 per week.

– Puzzled, Southampton UK, 21/5/2012 11:57
Clic

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Politicians (2 terms only, or no votes for the Oligarch MP in question) could try this below tax strategy for ‘winnability’ in politics :

Profit margins of Telecommunications companies (also ALL companies) may not exceed 10 times overhead costs once the CEO has reached wealth level of 20 million. All excess profit must be returned to the state for re-distribution. Maximum sequesterable funds by a company is at a quantum of 10 times whatever the total invested by shareholders. Excess may not be sequesterable if insufficient.

Penalties may not be levied by banks for early repayment. Interest is waived from point of early payment.
Housing Developers may not be affiliated to lawyers or financing firms.

Christine Lagarde has said that the move will be good for UK homeowners and businesses
A zero rate would be the first in the Bank of England’s 300-year history

Tough: Christine Lagarde has told the Bank of England to cut the record rate even lower to help Britain’s ailing economy. The head of the world’s economic watchdog today delivered an extraordinary call for the Bank of England to slash interest rates even further to try to boost the economy. Christine Lagarde, of the International Monetary Fund, said the Bank should ‘reassess the efficacy’ of cutting rates below the current record low of 0.5 per cent to reduce the cost of borrowing for businesses and homeowners. Her intervention raises the prospect of the first zero per cent interest rate since the Bank of England was founded in 1694. Japan cut rates to zero in the 1990s when it suffered a decade-long depression. Mme Lagarde also suggested that the Bank considers a fresh round of money printing — so-called ‘quantitative easing’ – to stimulate growth. Both measures would be grim news for savers, who have already been hit hard by low interest rates and earlier rounds of QE.

The IMF boss, in London to deliver her annual assessment of the UK economy, delighted Chancellor George Osborne with a strong endorsement of the coalition’s deficit reduction measures. She said that when she looked back to the last election in May 2010, and tried to imagine what would have happened to the British economy without the Government’s austerity programme: ‘I shiver.’ Pressure: The Bank of England has held interest rates at 0.5% for several years but is being asked to go further.

Mme Lagarde backed a suggestion by David Cameron that the Government should consider using hard-won credibility on the international money markets, which mean Britain is able to borrow at record lows, to do more to underwrite infrastructure and housing projects and loans to small businesses. The IMF also suggested there was scope for the Government to boost growth through higher spending on infrastructure projects, which would increase employment and demand within the economy and could be funded within existing budgets by imposing further public sector wage restraint or reforming property taxes. If the UK recovery fails to take off, ministers must be prepared to use temporary tax cuts and more infrastructure investment to give the economy a shot in the arm, even if this means reining in the Government’s austerity programme, the watchdog added. Chancellor George Osborne says the IMF report is backing the Coalition’s economic strategy

Welcoming the report, Chancellor George Osborne said: ‘The IMF couldn’t be clearer today. Britain has to deal with its debts and the Government’s fiscal policy is the appropriate one and an essential part of our road to recovery. ‘I welcome the IMF’s continuing support for the UK deficit reduction plan. They agree that, in their words ‘reducing the high structural deficit remains essential’ and make clear in their statement that they consider the current pace of fiscal consolidation to be appropriate. Mr Osborne said the eurozone was reaching a ‘critical point’ and confirmed that Britain was preparing to deal with the shock of a failure in the single currency. ‘In the UK, we have a flexible exchange rate and an independent monetary policy which allows us to ease the process of fiscal adjustment with a lower exchange rate and supportive monetary policy,’ he said.

‘But in the eurozone, indebted countries have to deal with high budget deficits without that support. ‘It is clear that we are now reaching a critical point for the eurozone. ‘Eurozone countries need to stand behind their currency or face up to the prospect of Greek exit, with all the risks that that could involve. ‘The British Government is doing contingency planning for all potential outcomes. It is our responsibility to ensure that while we work for the best, we prepare for something worse. ‘The IMF must also prepare for the consequences if members in Europe don’t follow its advice.’

Chinese Web users have posted details of US ambassador to China Gary Locke’s personal assets to their microblogs after a Beijing newspaper demanded Locke disclose his personal assets. Richard Buanga, spokesman of the US embassy in China who uses the Chinese name Bao Riqiang, also responded to the newspaper yesterday by uploading the foreign services salary table issued by the US Department of State. The Guangdong-based New Express Daily first reported the episode Monday, saying many Web users are encouraging the Beijing newspaper to make the same demand of officials in the capital. Beijing Daily, official newspaper of the municipal Party committee, demanded on its Sina Weibo that US ambassador to China Gary Locke announce his personal assets on Monday.

“Gary Locke, please declare your assets,” the microblog post commented, after reposting a microblog user’s opinion that read, “Gary Locke lives in the US embassy which costs billions of US dollars. He commutes in a bullet-proof Limousine…can this be called modesty? And why does Gary Locke not announce these facts to the public? …So cut the show of incorruptibility!”

The newspaper ran an editorial early this month criticizing Gary Locke for traveling in economy class and using coupons to buy coffee, among other things that drew the attention of the Chinese public, as a way of promoting his image. However, the newspaper’s latest Weibo posts immediately became a new focus for the Chinese online community. Despite the fact that the newspaper’s microblog filters comments, tens of thousands of Web users managed to make sarcastic remarks by reposting the original content. Observers said a foreign ambassador’s residence or expenditure has nothing to do with the host country’s taxpayers in the first place. But Web users showed more interest in why the practice of asset disclosure has not been applied to Chinese officials. A Central Party School newspaper said yesterday that China needs 10 years to implement asset declaration by officials. Government officials in China are now required to submit annual reports about their incomes, assets and information about their spouses and children. But the information is kept within related government departments. The Beijing Daily deleted its original post yesterday without elaborating on the reason. The Sina Weibo also began to manage the information flow yesterday by encrypting Web users’ comments.

Though the government is pushing forward the idea of making officials’ assets more transparent, it still needs years to be fully realized. And obviously Chinese people are more interested in the wealth of Chinese officials than that of foreign officials, said Lin Zhe, a professor at the Party School of the CPC Central Committee.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Though the government is pushing forward the idea of making officials’ assets more transparent, it still needs years to be fully realized.

Years? This would mean all assets would have been spread out to relatives, hidden or transfered to easily moved items like diamonds and gold by then. I really hope this is the last generation of plutocrats that have benefited from being in government. Otherwise, if honest, all declarations should be done in as soon as 1 week voluntarily on public sites. A disappointing reality that could still be identifiable and corrected. How about just declaring then re-distributing immediately if above USD$ 20 million? China is Communist Red not Capitalist Green. No plutocrats until the rest of the nation catches up.

Levitating Globe on Stage – Innovative levitating world globe continuously rotates in midair.
May 2012 Sale $99.99 Free shipping & handling Retail $109.00
Featuring a 3” globe that is awash in the brilliant light of 8 LED lights, this handsome desktop decoration will transform your workspace at home or the office. Developed with the latest Levitron Anti Gravity technology. Electromagnetic base uses minimal power to create Real Levitation with continuous rotations of the globe. Suspended in mid-air, this globe defies gravity – inspiring wonder and amazement.

Conclusion?
– to levitate 3 oz costs USD$99
– to levitate 63493.131 oz (or 4000 lbs the reegular weight of a car) the cost will b 6 million +
– consider the use of (hellium infusion augmented) bamboo and rattan entirely in the vehicle to lower to 10% of the weeight and hence price = 600,000 million

For 600,000 a FRICTIONLESS ‘REVERSE LEVITATING’ vehicle (probably powered by limitless Fusion) will be possible.

Consider the height of levitation and we could actually get a FLYING CAR. I really hope those governments will stop oppressing and start redistributing. Imagine caravans (or evenlarge craft) of people flying off to wherever has the laxest laws or is not governed by any government. Barring the MOST BASIC and common sense of religious laws (Self applied 10 comandments type laws, I am not referring to Hudud or whippings here, nor pedophile priests, not forced national service etc.. . . . ), WHO NEEDS GOVERNMENT OR LAWS? The only last issue will be overpopulation and redistribution of wealth and ownership of goods or food. Exciting times? But only if the best of Marx and Capitalism is used . . . Utopia is within reach via – Capitalism with Socialist Limits . . . with the identification of phenotypes and adherence to ‘Growth Outside As You Are Inside Spiritual Laws’ . . .

Ending big society via Aero-Nomadism . . .

ARTICLE 5

Privacy is being turned into a privilege that only the rich and right-on may enjoy – by Brendan O’Neill Politics Last updated: May 21st, 2012 CCTV

Keep ’em trained on the council estates, never the suburban semis Is privacy being turned into a privilege that only the moneyed and the well-connected may enjoy? Two striking stories in the news last week suggest that it is.

In the first story, it was reported that activists and hacks are heaping further pressure on Mark Zuckerberg to improve the privacy settings on Facebook, so that they might update their statuses and post photos of their social shenanigans without having the world and its mother peering over their shoulders. In the second story, we were told that social workers, backed by much of the media, are calling on the prime minister to get rid of “red tape” so that they might more easily interfere in – I’m sorry, intervene in – so-called problem families. There are a lot of damaged families out there, the social workers hinted, and thus we need to rip up some of the rules governing when it is and isn’t okay to stick our snouts into their business.

That these two stories could appear in the same week, and not be considered contradictory, suggests we have a pretty screwed-up attitude to privacy today. Indeed, sometimes the very same members of the political and media classes who believe that their private lives must remain absolutely private will think it is perfectly logical that other people’s private lives – the lives of Them – should be thrown open to state snooping.

So ours is an era in which the media goes mental when it is revealed that Sienna Miller was once photographed in an alleyway, yet raises barely a peep of protest when David Cameron says he plans to interfere in the lives of 120,000 allegedly “chaotic” families. Indeed, liberal commentators say we should be “less squeamish about intervening in chaotic families”, especially “impoverished” ones. Ours is an era where we are expected to weep upon hearing that Steve Coogan’s bins were rifled through by a tabloid hack, yet we brand as Right-wing crackpots those who question the right of their local council to police their bins to make sure they are recycling correctly.

This is an age in which civil-liberties types go ballistic over the fact that they must click a button saying “Private” when they use Spotify, but there’s little controversy when every ordinary man or woman hoping to become a schoolteacher or a youth worker must first submit to an intrusive criminal-records check. Things have come to such a pretty pass that Labour MP Tom Watson can expect sympathy for the fact that he was once followed around by a tabloid reporter, despite the fact that Watson’s own political party introduced rafts of legislation that permit the following, filming and collar-feeling of ordinary people across the land. Meanwhile, the New Statesman provides space to Hugh Grant to bleat about the “egregious abuses of privacy” suffered by the likes of him (posh people), while its star columnist, in a debate about the right of parents to smack their kids, says: “I don’t think sovereignty in people’s own homes is something we should be striving for.” No, apparently it is only right-minded celebs, not plebs, who deserve personal sovereignty.

Today there are shrill demands for a privacy law to protect celebs and other decent folk from the prurient gaze of dumb tabloid readers, alongside constant calls for better policing of the antics and habits of “chaotic” people, the impoverished. We are witnessing the emergence of a privacy hierarchy, where it is assumed that the decent class deserve a proper private life but the impoverished do not. Why? Because where Our lives are important and good, Theirs are potentially bad, certainly unpredictable, definitely “chaotic”, and thus we must pry into their bins and send social workers ir ‘moral police’ or narrow communalists to rap on their front doors in order to sort them out.

Whatever happened to the outlook of the 16th-century jurist Edward Coke, who said, “The house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence as for his repose”? In other words, every man’s home, be it an actual castle or just a two-bedroom flat in Hackney, should be treated as a fortress that state snitches have no business barging into. These days, it seems you really do need to own a castle – or at least a plush flat in Kensington or Islington – in order for your privacy rights to be taken seriously.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

This should be applied against plutocrats who send national monies to tax havens or sequestering funds that should be circulating in local communities instead of being used to prop up foreign commodities and foreign stock markets to the demise of the global supply chain system. THAT sort of nation destroying (think riots and occupy moements due to uncontrolled Capitalism) chaos propagated by plutocrats is far more dangerous than the odd dogging couple or organic drugs grower or adult industry indulger, adult industry worker and organizer.

ARTICLE 6

Internet voting still faces hurdles in US – Posted on 25 May 2012 – 05:33am

Pressure is building to make Internet voting widely available in the United States and elsewhere, even though technical experts say casting ballots online is far from secure. In the 2012 US elections, more than two dozen states will accept some form of electronic or faxed ballots, mostly from military or overseas voters, according to the Verified Voting Foundation. But there is a growing expectation that online voting will expand further.

“The number one question I’m asked is when we will get to vote on the Internet,” Matt Masterson, Ohio’s deputy election administrator, told a Washington forum this month. “When you are doing everything else on the Internet and your comfort level is high, people expect to do that… You can adopt a child online, you can buy a house online without ever seeing it.” But computer security specialists say any system can be hacked or manipulated, and that unlike shopping and banking, the problem cannot be fixed by giving the customer a refund. “You have computer systems such as those of Google, the Pentagon and Facebook, which have all fallen victim to intrusion,” said J. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan.

Halderman, who gained notoriety by hacking into a test of an online voting system in the US capital Washington in 2010 — forcing the system to be scrapped — said the technology is not yet secure enough. “It’s going to be decades, if ever, before we are going to be able to vote online securely,” he told the forum at George Washington University’s Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute.

Some other countries are forging ahead on Internet voting. French citizens living abroad will for the first time this year be able to vote in a parliamentary election over the Internet, an experiment that could be extended to other elections if successful. In Estonia, an early adopter, a record 25 percent of voters cast Internet ballots in 2011. But Halderman, who has consulted with European governments and studied other attempts at online voting, said: “I don’t believe any of them are secure.” In 2010 Halderman and his students accepted a challenge from the local government and were able to penetrate the Washington voting network, change all the votes and prompt the system to play the University of Michigan fight song.

Masterson said election officials are grappling with how to make voting more accessible and looking at the costs of the technology. Internet voting from that perspective makes some sense, he said. Masterson said online voting can also help boost participation and address the issue of voters who cannot get to a polling station. “It kills an election official to find out you can’t get a ballot back,” he said. “These people are being disenfranchised.” But Halderman counters that US elections provide a tempting target for hackers, nation-states and others who might want to destabilize or disrupt the US political system. “If everyone voted online today, I think the probability of substantial fraud would be 100 percent,” he said.

Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, of the Overseas Vote Foundation, works to make ballots more accessible, but remains uneasy with online voting. “It’s horrible to say this,” she said. “I come out of the software industry and push automation and technology for streamlining voting processes all day long, but right now, with the security issues that exist, there is no way I could advocate for Internet voting.”

GWU computer scientist Michael Clarkson said it’s not yet clear if online voting can be extended to national elections, where the risks of intrusion are high. “After 30 years of research, we don’t yet know how to do that in a way that scales to national elections, but we continue to make progress toward the goal,” he said.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, an arm of the Commerce Department, said this month its research had “concluded that Internet voting systems cannot currently be audited with a comparable level of confidence in the audit results as those for polling place systems. Additionally, malware on voters’ personal computers “poses a serious threat that could compromise the secrecy or integrity of voters’ ballots,” NIST said.

Richard Soudriette, head of the Colorado-based Center of Diplomacy and Democracy and a consultant on election issues, said he believes the technical and security problems of online voting have largely been resolved. “Over the past 10 years Internet voting firms have developed encryption and cryptography software tools that make voting much more secure,” he said. “I believe that within a decade most developed countries will conduct national elections via Internet.” – AFP

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

District by district, then a ‘monthly audit’ by publishing in the newspaper who voted and for who. Indiscrepencies can thus only last 1 month at most, at least for diligent voters.

A desperate jobseeker who applied for 15,000 jobs with no success in the past ten years has resorted to advertising himself by wearing a ‘hire me’ sandwich board. Robin Norton, from Birmingham, has a Masters degree in history and several NVQs but has been overlooked by an endless slew of employers. He has now taken drastic action, spending an entire day wearing a sign reading ‘hire me please’ and walking up and down the M5 slip-road at Bromsgrove junction in Worcestershire.
Extreme move: Robin Norton stood by the motorway wearing a sandwich board for a day in the hope of finding employment

Mr Norton said: ‘I have applied for around 25 jobs a week for the past ten years without getting anywhere. ‘Sometimes I have applied for as many as 50 in one week. It is never-ending. Mr Norton, who worked for the Royal Mail for seven years, was a self-employed footcare technician until 2002 when his business went under. Since then he has had odd-jobs including cleaning, gardening and building work, but craves the stability of full-time employment.

Reaching his limits: Mr Norton has a Masters degree in history and several NVQs but has been overlooked by employers He said: ‘Things were bad before but have become worse since the recession. Now I don’t think there is any chance of me getting work. ‘It is partly down to the recession but also my age. Companies don’t want to hire anybody in their 40s. All the jobs go to the young up-and-coming jobseekers. ‘I’ve got the qualifications but I can’t get the work. As soon as they see how old you are, they don’t want to know. ‘It’s against the law to be ageist but in the real world, my world here today, it’s still here and it’s wrong.’ Despite all his efforts, Mr Norton has had no job offers – and only a handful of interviews – and he said hitting rock-bottom convinced him to try a new tactic.

‘Wearing the sign is a last-ditch attempt for me to get work, a real last resort. I spent a couple of months working up the guts to go down and do it. ‘It was not an easy step but things have become that desperate for me. I feel physically sick having to stoop to this but I have no other choice.’
Jason Fruen found a job after advertising his skills on a sandwich board beside the M60. Mr Norton has set up an email address – hire-me-pleeaase@hotmail.co.uk (sic) – so potential employers can get in touch. Latest statistics show unemployment in the UK now stands at 2.63million, falling by 45,000 in the three months to March this year.

Mr Norton is not the first recession-hit jobseeker to try such dramatic measures after struggling to find work. Earlier this month, unemployed Bennett Olson, from Minnesota, put his face on an electric billboard with the words: ‘Hire Me!’ He shelled out $300 for his face to rotate with other adverts for 24 hours. Last year, frustrated U.S. jobseeker Alisha Madkins, from Boston, walked around the city centre wearing a sandwich board saying ‘hire me!’ on one side and ‘college grad’ on the other. But the strategy did work for one lucky Briton, who managed to impress would-be employers with his spirit and dedication. Father-of-one Jason Fruen gained a job in 2009 by standing for four hours at Junction 9 of the M60 in Manchester wearing a sandwich board.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Money cannot buy breeding, but education cannot get either money or breeding. ‘Educated fools with money on their mind . . . ‘ (Coolio – Gangsta’s Paradise, 1995) should not spend money that has no guarantees and that indebts one in the first place. Add the age factor, and ALL young graduates had better prepare to retire by 40. That means not getting a loan for education, and focusing on that loan for housing which is already overpriced as is. Then consider against the response in Article 2 below.

Congrats to proud owners of a 30,000 to 500,000 loan for a TICKET THAT ALLOWS WORK but has no guarantees except to enrich the financial institution in collusion with the state education apparatus and their pro-party jobsworths.

Everardo Gonzalez protests his student debt at San Francisco State’s graduation ceremony. …A handful of student activists are expressing their displeasure at the rising cost of college by wearing inflatable ball and chain accessories over their graduation robes. The props state the amount of debt with which they’re graduating. The silent commencement protest, dubbed “Occupy Graduation” by its organizers, is taking place at seven universities around the country.

Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerrys ice cream, is helping pay for the protest and has raised about $400,000 to fund Occupy-related projects.

“A college education is so important and now it’s only available to people who have a lot of money or to people who end up going into debt for the rest of their lives,” Cohen told Yahoo News. The entrepreneur never completed college, but he thinks it’s crucial to job success today.

Everardo Gonzalez, a 23 year-old criminal justice graduate of San Francisco State University, said he received “a bunch of positive feedback” from parents and fellow students for his participation in the quiet protest last Saturday at the graduation ceremony.

Gonzalez is graduating with $26,490 in federal loans and another $10,000 in credit card debt that he racked up while trying to make ends meet. His parents couldn’t afford to help him pay for college, so he worked at a local IKEA, struggling to balance his class schedule with his job.

During Gonzalez’s college career, San Francisco State University cut faculty salaries across the board, laid off staff, dramatically reduced the number of classes offered, hiked tuition and trimmed enrollment, all in response to the reduction in California’s higher education budget. Gonzalez was forced to spend another year at school–and take out more loans to do so–after he couldn’t find a way into the classes he needed for his major to graduate. (The crowded classes would fill up online within seconds.) The experience spurred him to join a group of student protesters linked with the Occupy Wall Street movement, who demonstrated against the cuts and other issues this year.

Gonzalez has landed a paid internship for next year, and plans to get a master’s degree in political theory after that to become a teacher. Gonzalez’ debt load is actually about average for graduating college students who took out loans. By attending an in-state school, qualifying for grants and relying solely on federal–not private–loans, Gonzalez has a manageable amount of loans with comparatively low interest rates.

“I’m not the poster child of student debt,” he says, but adds that many of his friends are in a worse position. He believes college education should be free, and that existing student loans should be forgiven. Seeing his parents lose their home after the recession hit also made him passionate about advocating for more opportunities for middle class and poor people. “The entire system is set up for people to fail unless they’re privileged,” he says.

Ivonne Quiroz, another San Francisco State University protester who graduated with a degree in biology last weekend, was also forced to stay at college for an extra semester after the immunology class she needed to graduate filled up. She’s now walking down the aisle with about $21,000 in federal loans. Quiroz said the budget cuts also fueled her protest. “We’re paying so much more, but we’re getting so much less,” she said.

Various Occupy movements have advocated for changing the law so that student debt can be discharged in bankruptcy, forgiving student loans altogether, and having zero percent interest loans for education. Interest rates on subsidized federal student loans are expected to double to 6.8 percent this year, unless Congress passes a law to extend the grace period. (Private loans have higher interest rates.) Still, on average, college graduates make far more money and enjoy lower unemployment rates than their peers with only a high school diploma.

Student protesters at the University of Southern Maine. (Occupy Graduation)

Another protest is planned for Hunter College in New York at the graduation ceremony on Tuesday. Monica Johnson, a 35-year-old Hunter College graduate student who’s helping to organize the demonstration, borrowed about $15,000 in federally secured loans 15 years ago to pay for college. But in 2007, she decided to move to New York to get a masters of fine arts degree at Pratt, a private school. She took out an additional $60,000 in loans, which ballooned to $88,000 after she dropped out of the program, dissatisfied. She now has a full-time job at an arts non-profit and is enrolled at the much cheaper Hunter College, where she’ll receive her MFA in December.

Johnson recently paid off $18,000 of her debt over a period of eight months, by subsisting on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and only paying for things in cash, which she said helped her resist buying anything unnecessary. She’s encouraging indebted graduates to form a union and negotiate with lenders to get lower rates or income-based repayment.

“What really pisses me off is I should never have been given those loans,” Johnson said. “It honestly was the worst money I ever spent.”

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Some of us would look at the figures and decide not to bother with the aggravation of education and the debt caused. The clever would become estate owners or landlords instead, and have an income from sale of REAL PRODUCE and REAL GOODS cultivated from the land if not a slumlord via rental of properties to tenants. With that kind of money, one could buy several units of low cost housing (which do pay themselves off) and RETIRE at the ripe old age of 16 or 18 while those who opted for education would be indebted and if they do not ‘bend’ enough to their future bosses and toe ‘company lines’, pay monthly rentals instead of collecting rentals, will remain homeless and potentially could be bankrupt (depending on jobs market) instead. Consumerism is at an end, population growth cannot be sustained by the planet, meaning population growth cannot sustain consumerism.

ARTICLE 3

The fashionable hostility towards social mobility is just another way of saying ‘know your place’ – by Brendan O’Neill Politics Last updated: May 22nd, 2012

Loadsamoney: how the liberal elite view “social mobility”

Is there anyone the great and the good hate more than an upwardly mobile member of the working classes? A raft of abusive terminology has been created to diss these strange creatures. They’re seen as “yuppies” or “Loadsamoneys”, waving their wads of cash around with a sneering look of self-satisfaction on their faces. They’re always described as “grasping” and “ruthless”. They are treated like fish out of water, such as when The Guardian snottily said that wealthy working-class footballers labour under “the misapprehension that drinking champagne is a symbol of class”. And they are always depicted as soulless, as lacking in community spirit, as so selfish that they would rather escape the poor communities they grew up in rather than stay put and muck in. Watch the movies of Mike Leigh. Almost every one of them contains such a character: the grasping working-class man or woman who runs away from his or her council estate to live in a big but heartless house in the suburbs. How middle-class moviegoers love to laugh at such specimens!

Now Ed Miliband has weighed into the discussion about social mobility. It is always a pleasure to hear what someone who was brought up in Hampstead and babysat by professors thinks about “the assumptions behind social mobility”. According to Miliband, in a speech he gave yesterday, there is too much focus on creating the conditions to allow smart, ambitious working-class people to get ahead, and not enough focus on ensuring that inequality is not “handed down generation to generation, like the colour of our hair”. It sounds radical, but in truth Miliband is implicitly demonising, or at least problematising, the exercise of individual initiative to move on in life, since this leaves untouched the structural underpinnings of inequality. He is, in effect, playing off “grasping” members of the working classes against less fortunate members of the working classes, as if the social mobility of the former is somehow responsible for the social predicament of the latter.

His criticisms of social mobility have struck a chord with Leftists who have long felt uncomfortable with ambitious, materialistic working-class people (primarily because they don’t conform to the Full Monty model of less well-off people being hard-done-by but happy). One Labour blogger spoke for many when he applauded Miliband’s comments by saying, “The politics of social mobility has always left me cold”. Labour MP Hazel Blears has gone further, saying: “I’ve never understood the term social mobility because that implies you want to get out of somewhere… And I think there is a great deal to be said for making who you are something to be proud of.”

Blears’ comments cut to the heart of the modern Left’s discomfort with social mobility, whether it is expressed through crude, comical stereotypes of money-mad former council-estate dwellers or through seemingly radical speeches that ask “What about the rest of the working class?” What is really being expressed here is a disgust with poor people who don’t know their place, who aren’t proud of “who they are”, as Blears puts it, and who insist on leaping from one class into another. The reason these individuals make people like Miliband and Blears feel uncomfortable is because they are a stark reminder of the failure of the modern Left, and of Labour in particular, to make good on its 1960s promise to create an egalitarian, more prosperous society. The fact that working-class individuals who want to get ahead must play the same game as the upper classes of society – that is, be spectacularly self-possessed, individualistic, ruthless – is a powerful reminder of Labour’s failure to create a society in which all classes could equally pursue their ambitions. That is why so much bile is heaped on those “Loadsamoneys” who hail from working-class communities: their very existence, their attitudes and antics, expose Labour’s failure to improve the living conditions and raise the expectations of all sections of society.

And so the Left sneers at these socially mobile workers, because it would prefer that they stayed put rather than unwittingly shining a light on the fact that the Labour Left’s historic talk of boosting everyone’s fortunes has been so much flimflam. Their ambition is slated because it is too much of an uncomfortable echo of the kind of life and drive that Labour once promised to deliver to all. These people should stop focusing on “getting out of somewhere” and instead, in the embarrassing words of Leftist author Owen Jones, celebrate their “working classness”. That phrase suggests that being working class is an innate trait, like sex or hair colour. But it isn’t. It’s a social condition, or a social predicament if you like, and like all social conditions it can be overcome and transformed. Ambitious working-class people shouldn’t be made to feel bad about their material desires just because they make socially accomplished people like Miliband, Blears and Owen Jones feel awkward.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Clear definitions of social types and levels, clear methods of raising in stature are needed, AND incentives associated with values based instead of cash based social mobility (capitalist plutocracies are NOT ethical or moral societies incidentally) should counter the ‘hostility to social mobility (i.e. here is what needs to be abided by, these are the classes etc.. instead of money rules all which eventually degenerates into dirty money politics and hired hitmen of the materialist plutocrat method – a person who will bribe their way into power, use the Judiciary as a weapon, will also kill their way into power, returning to the dark ages).

ARTICLE 4

U.S. Army General: The Whole Northern Hemisphere is at Risk of Becoming Largely Uninhabitable – Mac Slavo – May 25th, 2012 – SHTFplan.com

You may have entertained the idea of an improbable civilization ending events such as a ‘global killer’ asteroid, earth crust displacement or massive solar storms, but what if there existed a situation right now that was so serious that it literally threatened our very existence?

According to a host of scientists, nuclear experts and researchers, were are facing exactly such a scenario – and current efforts may not be able to stop it.

When the Fukushima nuclear plants sustained structural damage and a catastrophic failure of their spent fuel cooling systems in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami in 2011, it left the government of Japan, Tokyo Power and nuclear regulatory agencies around the world powerless to contain the release of deadly radiation. A year on, the battle for control of Fukushima continues to no avail.

It’s estimated that tens of thousands of people in Japan and the whole of North America have been affected, with reports indicating that children in Japan and the U.S. are already being born with birth defects, as well as thousands who have already succumbed to radiation related illness. As we initially followed the breaking news during the first thirty days of the accident, we suggested the Fukushima disaster would be worse than Chernobyl. Not even we could have imagined how much worse it would be.

If current estimates are correct, Fukushima has already released as much radiation into the atmosphere and Pacific Ocean as Chernobyl, and the potential for a disaster at least ten times worse is highly probable in the event of another earthquake or accident that leads to a collapse of the cooling structures which are above ground and have already suffered significant damage. According to U.S. Army General Albert N. Stubblebine (ret.) of the Natural Solutions Foundation, the situation is extremely serious and poses a significant danger to our entire civilization. Since TEPCO and the Japanese government have refused the entombment option (as the Russians did with Chernobyl) the world is at the mercy of nature. A mistake here would cause the deaths of tens of millions of people across the globe. If there ever existed a threat that could cause the end of the world as we know it, it’s the ongoing and unresolved nuclear saga in Japan:

When the highly radioactive Spent Fuel Rods are exposed to air, there will be massive explosions releasing many times the amount or radiation released thus far. Bizarrely, they are stored three stories above ground in open concrete storage pools. Whether through evaporation of the water in the pools, or due to the inevitable further collapse of the structure, there is a severe risk. United States public health authorities agree that tens of thousands of North Americans have already died from the Fukushima calamity. When the final cataclysm occurs, sooner rather than later, the whole Northern Hemisphere is at risk of becoming largely uninhabitable.

Fact. On March 11, 2011, Fukushima Daichi nuclear power station with six nuclear reactors suffered cataclysmic damage that some believe was a man made event,and the resulting Tsunami. Hydrogen explosions…at least one nuclear explosion… and then subsequent deterioration of the visible plants at five of those reactors have created a threat situation unparalleled in human history.
Fact. Despite denial and cover-up, the reality has emerged, that enormous amounts of radioactive material has been spewing into the atmosphere, polluting the groundwater, and the food of Japan, and entering by the tens of millions of gallons the waters of the Pacific.

There’s no way to sugarcoat these facts. Denying them, blocking them out, pretending that they are not real is of no help to you and your family, and it leaves you totally unprepared for a danger that the Natural Solutions Foundation has been warning about since the first day. As of three weeks ago the levels of radiation inside of the spent fuel pools of unit no. 2 are too high to measure. Get that… too high to measure. And, the water there is evaporating, meaning that heat and radiation could easily build to very high levels.

Very simply put, if this much Cesium 137 is released, it will destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugulistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.

We can play the denial game all day long and pretend that, because the mainstream media is not reporting on it, there is no threat, but the facts are quite clear. This is, without a doubt, the most immediate threat faced by the world. It’s so serious, in fact, that the Japanese government has considered and put into place evacuation plans for the whole of Tokyo – some 40 million people. Reports are also emerging that suggest a collapse of the spent fuel pools would be so serious that the entire country of Japan may have to be evacuated. The entire country – that’s 125 million refugees that will cause an unprecedented humanitarian disaster. Before you argue that these are the ravings of just alternative media conspiracy theorists and fearmongers, consider the assessment put forth by Robert Alvarez , a senior policy adviser to the Secretary for National Security and the Environment for the US Department of Energy: The No. 4 pool is about 100 feet above ground, is structurally damaged and is exposed to the open elements. If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident. The infrastructure to safely remove this material was destroyed as it was at the other three reactors. Spent reactor fuel cannot be simply lifted into the air by a crane as if it were routine cargo. In order to prevent severe radiation exposures, fires and possible explosions, it must be transferred at all times in water and heavily shielded structures into dry casks.. As this has never been done before, the removal of the spent fuel from the pools at the damaged Fukushima-Dai-Ichi reactors will require a major and time-consuming re-construction effort and will be charting in unknown waters.

The total spent reactor fuel inventory at the Fukushima-Daichi site contains nearly half of the total amount of Cs-137 estimated by the NCRP to have been released by all atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, Chernobyl, and world-wide reprocessing plants (~270 million curies or ~9.9 E+18 Becquerel). It is important for the public to understand that reactors that have been operating for decades, such as those at the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site, have generated some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet. Regulatory agencies all over the world are warning of the potentiality of a further degradation of the Fukushima nuclear reactors and spent fuel pools, and the subsequent nuclear fallout that would follow. If these reactors go – and they could at any moment for any number of reasons – we’re looking at a situation for which you simply cannot stock enough food, or water, or supplies. Radiation would spread across the entire northern hemisphere and would be impossible to contain. While we’ve argued in the past that there is no place we’d rather be than in the United States of America in the event of a socio-economic collapse or global conflict, if these spent fuel pools collapse, then an international exit strategy may be the only option. Because details are sparse and research limited, it is difficult to predict what nuclear fall out from Japan may look like. The following map may be of some help, as it details the estimated fallout pattern resulting from a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. You’ll note that, while most of the world would be irradiated, the southern hemisphere would be your best bet to avoid the brunt of it:

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to http://www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

The capitalist-consumerist paradigm is over. The peoples of the planet are at a cultural-conservatism, wealth-redistribution phase. A report said that solar panels covering the size of Nevada can power the whole of the USA. To protect the environment, shut down all those nuke plants and decommission all nuke warheads, Bury all of the nuclear material in a NON-QUAKE ZONE and go non-GMO. Distribute the land equally to everyone for subsistence farming, end of the food stamp and distribution or labour and work problems.

As for financing . . . Need to eat? Grow own food. Need materials for house? Grow materials from trees and build your own with some carpentry, quarry your own stones or bag up compacted soil or even compacted TRASH. Education? Based from internet FOR FREE and marked on ability to think critically (a handful of questions on ethics and logic, nominally COMMON SENSE morality (not the length of skirt or sexual orientation, if they they gamble or drink or use organics, but if one will be a corporate raider, accept golden parachute bonuses – instead of amending company policy to be fair to stockholders – when a company collapses taking out ordinary 401K type stockholders, or write a law lowering election deposits instead of assigning taxpayer finds to one’s own funeral which has not occurred by sheer skewed sense of entitlement, raising bureaucrat salaries many times above GDP growth and inflation, holding on to power after 2 terms effectively preventing the rest of the nation from participating in policy making (sometimes generationally like so many Arab Spring type dictators) . . .

The above . . . will decide who has the ethical balls, rather than being a greedy, lazy and mob minded, yet cowardly pack of followers afraid to step out of line to make a point, or simply spineless and going along with ‘the flow’ (the fundo-psyche-politico-sycophant establishments decided to punish some of us ‘activists’ and critical thinkers for making a point and a stand . . . ), to insist on the need of TERM LIMITED bureaucrats) joins the army or police, or is best suited for research and trend studies law amending studies etc., or entirely unsuitable for anything – meaning subsistence sponsored by government or their family (mainly those who ask for near 2 times 401K for their funeral funds simply because they were some bureaucrat in the past) . . . not rote, learn, memorise and toe authoritarian political lines, there are no such lines, humanity is as free as the next bacterium excepting the civilising effect of laws that prevent abuse or parasitisation of others.

The earth belongs to everyone right (99%!~)? So everyone has the right to a piece of land enough for their own families (thats right no 2nd 3rd or 10th homes for plutocrats or law makers that allow vast swathes of arable or liveable land to be unusable while the homeless who could be growing their own food or building their own homes are stuck in cities disallowed from using that same land . . . or insisting that accreditation bureaucrats and boards and buildings, building materials suppliers, building contractors or stationary and book supply contractors, bureaucrats, then canteen suppliers and food preparers who want to value add to their profits (20% to 300% increases?) sweepers and gardeners and security guards (who all would possibly rather prefer to be growing their own food on land distributed from unused land banks of ‘state land’ if given a choice) to be needed to qualify an education, instead of anyone who doesn’t mind sitting in an empty parking lot to ‘educate’ then allow those who attended to claim a degree to start working . . . a degree could cost nothing well at most everyone collectively could give the lecturer minimum wage (100 students per open air class divided by 7.50 per x10 hours = 75 cents per student per day . . . 273.75 per year of ‘University’) . . . students do you know why your degree costs so much now? Because of Education-Financier Complex described above . . . ). The cities earlier built needn’t even be abandoned though different rules could apply (Capitalist non-distribution Zones?) since those are supposed to be ‘prime territory’. WTF is UN or NAM doing?

Earth has 36.48 billion acres. However, there are only 12 million square miles (7.68 billion acres) of arable land. In 2006, there were 1.15 acres of arable land per person, world-wide (i.e. 7.68 billion acres / 6.68 billion people). With irrigation and forestration work (think Gaddafi’s GMRP Nubian Aquifer system -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Manmade_River), this could be 100 times more in as soon as 10-20 years.

Now, think 3 dimensionally in existing arable areas, where up to 3 to 20 times the amount of arable land could be created (with 15 storey high , or 50 perhaps added modularly, if needed, via the corkscrew form structures seen in link below) . . .

Finally, voters should not vote self serving plutocrats, or fundos or undemocratic minded nepotists, into power who do not respect term limits or understand ethical prohibitions in creating blocs of relatives (much less term limitless ones) in government. Whats wrong with everyone? Too stupid? Who have you been voting for? Check the background or run for election yourselves!

He may only be a spring chicken at the age of 25. But despite the wide age gap, Jennifer Lopez’s new flame has all the qualities of a traditional and perhaps older gentleman. The 42-year-old’s backing dancer beau, Casper Smart, accompanied his lady on a shopping trip to the Grove in West Hollywood today. Age gap love: Jennifer Lopez locked hands with her boyfriend Casper Smart as the pair shopped at The Grove in West Hollywood, California today. And while a retail outing with their partner sounds like a nightmare for many men, Smart seemed perfectly happy to be at Lopez’s beck and call as she picked out fashionable items.

They emerged from the celebrity-favourite shopping centre showing no signs of bickering between the clothing rails as they held hands and walked thought the parking lot.

The young man even lugged his partner’s bulging bags as she simply carried her bag over her shoulder.
Bagsy this one! Jennifer looked smug her man carried her Zara bags around

Bagsy this one! Jennifer looked smug her man carried her Zara bags around

Nothing but a number: The performer’s younger man is 25 while she is 42

Trendy boy: Smart dressed stylishly in a trilby hat and sunglasses

While trendy Casper donned a trilby hat and sunglasses with his white T-shirt and black trousers, his girlfriend stood out as they made their way to the car.

She drew attention to her shoulders as she wore her hair in a bun on top of her head and blue jumpsuit embellished with a waist belt.

Cream gladiator sandals graced her feet and white framed sunglasses shielded her eyes.
Making a fuss: He even opened the car door for his woman showing chivalry isn’t dead

Making a fuss: He opened the car door for his woman showing chivalry isn’t dead

Casper was quick to open the passenger door for his older woman as she approach the vehicle so it’s no wonder, she has been singing his praises recently.

She unleashed a cringeworthy PDA when she performed on American Idol earlier this season with her lover also on stage with her.

In a moment that saw Casper pick confetti out of J-Lo’s hair after the performance ended in a flurry of ticker tape, she immediately said to the audience: ‘He’s so cute!’

Additionally, last month People magazine reported that he sees the star as royalty.

A source said: ‘There is a lot of love between [them], he treats her like a queen.’
Passion for fashion: J-Lo looked great in a blue jumpsuit with light-coloured bag, shoes and belt

Passion for fashion: J-Lo looked great in a blue jumpsuit with light-coloured bag

what because no other man anywhere has ever carried his womans bags? tell ya what come take pics of me day to day, opening doors for women, carrying bags for my partner, women first etc etc but i dont have a news article do i?

– Michael Smith, Pontefract, 22/5/2012 10:47
Rating 3

wish my man would treat me like that! lol am i right ladies??

– jennyfromtheblock, Sheffield, UK, 22/5/2012 00:12
Rating 16

There is nothing like a hot, fit, young stallion for some fun and rejuvenation! 🙂 Enjoy it, JLO! good on you!

– a., England, 21/5/2012 23:58
Rating 24

Will she snap off his thing if he tries to leave?

– wondering, Canada, 21/5/2012 23:21
Rating 8

Same type of pictures as LeAnn Rimes, so is she pay DM too? lol ……….. selective indignation.

– Jullou, Glendale, AZ, 21/5/2012 18:35
Rating 5

Well, she’s his BOSS & his sole source of income, right? I’m not sure he’s such a fabulous gentleman, maybe just a good employee– sorry!

– jenisoutherngirl, Bham, USA, 21/5/2012 18:14
Rating 60

And man servant is all he really is. I give it one year. Meanwhile her two kids suffer all this and will be in rehab by the time they’re 18.

– Doug Smart, New York, USA, 21/5/2012 17:49
Rating 38

HA! I love it. One photo signifies his character and their relationship entirely. If he was snapped putting it down I wonder what the article would be about….zzz

– Michelle, London, 21/5/2012 16:23
Rating 17

It’s amazing what extensions can do to Jeniifers hair, but when they come off, theres litteraloy just a small amount of hair. love her though

– Tino, Brighton, United Kingdom, 21/5/2012 15:49
Rating 29

J-Lo is millions times better than Kim

– Genevieve, bristol, 21/5/2012 15:39

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Both of them should hire a footman, maid, or few for this sort of thing if Casper wants to raise his status to that of an equal.. IDK but some cynical feminists could well be thinking how they got all the guys under control. Carrying bags or opening doors is not chivalry, this is the work of footmen glorified as chivalry. Chivalry is a mindset and for the poor who cannot afford footmen, yes this would count. But to do a high profile MSM on a couple at this level of wealth who could hire an entourage of servants and footmen, this ends up potentially (I stress potentially, so will the psychoanalysts lay off whatever presumed smartsauce – theirs or others), as a farcical take on the concept of chivalry per se to manipulate the masses with a feminist agenda instead. In fact a PA designated as a PA who has any pride of self, would (especially if pointedly asked) REFUSE to carry bags, open doors, or carry umbrellas, these sorts of jobs are decidely menial in nature, money is one thing, but job description and the ability to REFUSE to do such work, is another. The bosses who do fire for such refusals are despots and no respectable members of society.

Of course if you want to say, these are your mere ‘Sudra entertainer’ class, and to not take them seriously, we could well just ignore all MSM (and MSM manipulation) as well.

Geri Halliwell has offered a glimmer of hope to Spice Girls fans desperate to see the Nineties group reform for the Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. ‘It would be unfair of me to reveal anything now,’ Geri, 39, hinted with a wink at the Heather Kerzner and Marie Curie Cancer Care dinner.

Melanie ‘Mel C’ Chisholm, 38, added to the intrigue, saying: ‘I think we need to get our skates on and do it before we are too old!’ Sparking rumours: Geri Halliwell has dropped a hint that the Spice Girls could reform in time for the Queen’s Jubilee and the Olympics. Reunited: Fans of the 90s group the Spice Girls may not have to wait long to see them back on stage. Party girl Kate adds a twist of glamour. Kate Moss pictured with Heather at the event.

Hosting a glamorous fundraising party at Claridge’s in Mayfair last week for Marie Curie Cancer Care, socialite Heather Kerzner tried to persuade pal Kate Moss to get up and sing with music legends Ronnie Wood and Sam Moore. Kate, pictured with Heather at the event, has been known to have impromptu singalongs – once joining in with Primal Scream and on another occasion duetting with Boy George – but this time insisted her singing wasn’t good enough. But she did jump on stage to dance and help at the auction. ‘It was amazing to see her on stage with Ronnie and Sam,’ said Heather. Kate turned up with husband Jamie Hince and Heather said: ‘It was lovely seeing them so happy.’ The party raised more than £620,000. Charlotte Church is turning to Florence Welch for inspiration as she prepares to relaunch her singing career.

The 26-year-old is making her comeback next month at the philosophy and music festival How The Light Gets In, which is running alongside the Hay literary festival at Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh border. Charlotte, who rose to fame as a classical singer before crossing over to pop music in 2005, will perform live for the first time in two years. ‘Her sound is a cross between Florence and the Machine and Kate Bush,’ said a spokesman for the festival.

Charlotte said: ‘It’s a great festival and I’ve missed playing live. The music is different to anything I’ve done before, so I recommend people come with an open mind.’ American Pie actress Tara Reid has been canoodling in Cannes with 60-year-old gems tycoon Fawaz Gruosi. The blonde Hollywood star, 36, was spotted at a Raffles boat party that the founder of de Grisogono luxury jewellery was hosting with Eva Longoria for the film festival. ‘Tara and Faraz could not keep their hands off each other,’ a source says. ‘She sat on his lap and he ran his hands all over her. They left together and he certainly seemed to be her sugar daddy.’ Fawaz counts Naomi Campbell among his many younger female admirers.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Has been ‘time out’ for a decade or more for these married mothers. Come on girls, look for and even FUND replacement lookalikes and give some younger kids a chance in the spotlight. Spicegirls can live on but don’t make a Mubarak or a Gaddafi out of the girl power. Some memes just don’t grow better when their creators get older. Burnt out vs fresh faced! Try the below charts for ‘rating’ stars :

Rating Stars (or any public figures like television hosts, though a programme with a target demogrphic that consists of married people can ignore the marriage factor)

+2 Unattached Bisexual
+1 Unattached Hetero
0 On and off with someone not too unpopular
-1 Attached (+1 for the ‘loves to break up relationships type’ but this isn’t exactly healthy to promote . . . )
-2 Married (+1 for the ‘cast eyes on wives type’ but this isn’t exactly healthy to promote . . . )
-3 Married with children (+2 for the ‘MILF chaser type’ but this isn’t exactly healthy to promote . . . )

+2 extreme good looks
+1 good looks
0 average looks
-1 bad looks (but if matched with the corrct film ideal for such looks can be +1 memorable)
+2 extreme bad looks (but if matched with the corrct film ideal for such looks can be +2 memorable)

+1 consistent character depictions/style type (i.e. ken-barbies stay ken-barbies, or goths stay goth, not turn into corporate types then switch again etc.
baldies stay bald, hairstyle types stay consistent (even if unsuitable which in itself can be an identifier and consistency)
0 average people do no stand out or perhaps have no chance to
-1 inconsistent character depictions/style type

One of America’s busiest airports, Orlando Sanford International, has announced it will opt out of using TSA workers to screen passengers, a move which threatens the highly unpopular federal agency’s role in other airports across the nation.

“The president of the airport said Tuesday that he would apply again to use private operators to screen passengers, using federal standards and oversight,” reports the Miami Herald.

With Sanford International having originally been prevented by the TSA from opting out back in November 2010 when the federal agency froze the ability for airports to use their own private screeners, a law passed by the Senate last month forces the TSA to reconsider applications.

Larry Dale hinted that the move was motivated by the innumerable horror stories passengers have told of their encounters with the TSA, noting that the change was designed to provide a more “customer friendly” operation.

The agency has been slow to reissue the guidelines on the the rule change, prompting Republican Representatives John Mica of Florida, Darrell Issa of California and Jason Chaffetz of Utah to press TSA head John Pistole to implement the mandate.

Appearing at Orlando Sanford International yesterday, Mica said he had written to 200 airports advising them of the opportunity to op out of using TSA screeners.

Orlando Sanford is in the top 30 busiest airports in the world, with large numbers of takeoffs and landings.

The TSA has been keen to downplay the opportunity for airports to dispense with their screeners, fearing a mass exodus that could undermine the justification for the agency’s continued existence, especially given the fact that its reputation has been repeatedly savaged by a number of scandals.

The most recent controversy involved a viral You Tube video created by engineer Jon Corbett which demonstrated how the TSA’s body scanners were virtually useless because they are unable to detect objects carried on the side of the body carried in a pocket.

The TSA responded by threatening the media not to cover the issue while putting out a blog statement that completely failed to rebut the claims made by Corbett.

A November 2010 poll found that the TSA’s “enhanced pat downs,” some of which include touching genitalia, angered 57% of regular adult fliers.

West Yellowstone Airport in Montana has already replaced its TSA screeners with private security. Bert Mooney Airport, also in Montana, is attempting to do the same.

However, when Texas lawmakers attempted to pass a bill last year that would have outlawed invasive TSA pat downs, the feds threatened to implement a blockade that would have imposed a defacto “no fly zone” over the lone star state.

Kicking out the incompetent, criminally-inclined and abusive TSA across the nation will not only encourage millions of peeved Americans to start flying again, pumping much needed money into the travel industry, it will also create thousands of new private sector jobs.

TSA Harasses and Gropes Quadruple Amputee

*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars

Nightly News.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

How many years before this airport decided to opt out? Better late than never, so good work on leading the pack Orlando Sanford International . . .

ARTICLE 2

Should your child be spanked at school? – by Yunji De NIES – Good Morning America ABC News)

It is one of the most controversial methods of child discipline, but spanking in school — usually with a wooden or fiberglass paddle — is still allowed by law in 19 states. The practice is most prevalent in the Midwest and South. According to a report from the Juvenile Information Exchange, more than 28,500 students in Georgia were spanked in 2008, mostly in rural counties. The number is much smaller in Florida — around 3,600 last year — but that’s where the issue is getting new attention.

For the second year in a row, a Florida lawmaker is trying to ban corporal punishment in schools there; last year the measure never made it to the floor for a full vote.

Opponents of the ban say spanking is matter of tradition and good old-fashioned discipline. But at least one Florida mom is suing to stop the practice. Tenika Jones says the principal at the Joyce Bullock Elementary School in Levy County paddled her 5-year-old so severely last April that he cried for hours, triggering an asthma attack, which in turn required a trip to the emergency room.

The boy was spanked for roughhousing with another student on a school bus. Jones said her son had welts on his buttocks, missed a week of school and still has nightmares about the incident.

“That’s child abuse to me,” the 32-year old told reporters, “If they don’t want us to hit our kids, they shouldn’t either.” Principal Jaime Handlin declined to comment, citing the on-going legislation, but she did tell the Willston Pioneer newspaper that “nothing was violated.”

She added, “I disciplined out of love, not anger.”

Researchers have found that spanking can increase aggressiveness in children and can even hurt the mental development of young children.

“Corporal punishment doesn’t get us the results we want,” said Deborah Sendek, program director of the Center for Effective Discipline, a group that advocates against corporal punishment. “You can get the same result from an intervention – simply telling and teaching children to stop the behavior.”

Sendek says the practice is not only ineffective, it can also teach children that hitting is acceptable. Sendek, who has worked in with abused and neglected children for three decades, says children who are hit ultimately learn to avoid the punisher, not the behavior.

She cited a number of instances in which children were seriously injured and asked why so many American children are subject to this type of punishment.

“We’re not allowed to hit a prisoner. We do not hit in the military,” Sendek said, “Why do we give prisoners more protection than we give our schoolchildren?

Even if parents do not agree with corporal punishment, there is little they can do, if a school district permits it, to guarantee that their child will not be hit by an administrator if she or he misbehaves. Sendek says her group suggests that parents who want to opt out of that type of discipline should send a letter to the principal and school administrators at the beginning of each school year, and make sure that their concerns are put in the child’s permanent record. She also recommends reviewing the school district’s disciplinary policies and voicing any concerns at parent/teacher conferences or school board meetings before a child is ever hit.

Beating of children if allowed by school should be the parent’s choice not the state’s choice and separate schools should be built for parents who opt out in these states. Opt out options are a sign of civilised law writing, not for a mob minded ‘majority’ to impose upon parents who do not want their kids to be beaten by the school. Then there is the issue of a child reaching sufficient cognisance to opt out regardless of age but rather by a psyche test to determine if that child is socially mature enough to CHOOSE to opt out. A child is also a person, and though not yet biologically mature, may be mature enough to decide what ANOTHER PERSON does to their body. Classes could be held to inform children on their rights to opt out for a start if the 19 states involved in beating kids at schools wish to be U.N. Charter’s Child Rights compliant.

What is happening to the medical profession — Concerned senior citizen – July 20, 2011

JULY 20 — As I write this I am saddled with a sadness wondering if the years of hard work and effort spent at the medical college by medical students before they can be certified as medical graduates is indeed worth all the labour and time.

I have spent more than 30 years serving the people but today I am at a crossroads wondering if I am witness to the beginning of the end of the glorious and noble profession that is the medical health sciences. Sadly there are growing signs that the sacrosanct ideals of the profession seem to be fading.

My close observation of the profession — and that includes all healing sciences be it medical, dental or any other as long as healing is involved — is that the number of doctors present in this country is ever increasing. The number of hospitals is equally impressive; both government and private.

The private establishments attempt to equip themselves with the most expensive facilities in terms of style, décor and sophistication in terms of equipment for diagnosis, treatment and of course patient recovery. This must also be accompanied by patient comfort. Having said this, my observation is that the cost of patient care has become inflated to an extent that it is hugely frightening for a citizen when he/she falls ill.

Is the medical cost in tandem with the citizens per capita income or within his/her means? If a patient is struck with an illness like stroke or cancer or organ failure then the fear of not being able to meet the cost is even more frightening. If this is really the case then are the doctors still holding on to the sacred belief that their duty is to heal the patient at all costs.

Now, the phrase at all costs may be contentious for a debate but not forgetting that it is the aim of every doctor to heal the sick. If a patient cannot be healed by a doctor then it defeats the purpose of that visit and it also defeats the purpose of the doctor meeting with the patient. What does a doctor do then? Has he a choice of doing anything else to achieve that goal. This is something that is left to the doctor himself/herself.

The point I am driving at is this. Being able to come to a correct diagnosis is good and this can be obtained with expensive technology. But is this going to make it impossible for the patient to afford this service? If it is really the case then how does the doctor adapt himself to make it possible for him to do what he is supposed to do and that is to attend to the patient and achieve the healing.

Now the question: Is healing based on all the expensive machinery and the most expensive drugs available in the market? This is something doctors must most honestly search their minds and answer. Then again I have to ask. With all the expensive machinery and drugs available, why is it that many of the diseases are still left incurable. Is cough and cold curable? How then does it get cured? Is cancer curable? Is diabetes curable? Is eczema curable? When I say cure I mean that the disease becomes non-existent.

This is what I mean. If a patient has to be on a drug on a lifetime basis then it is not a cure. The disease is still inherent with the symptoms merely being blanketed by drugs till death takes over. The aim of a doctor is to heal the sick. If the healing has not been obtained then it is only logical that the treatment could have been either wrong or insufficient.

This unfortunately is the saddest part of being a doctor. Where then is the missing link? This is food for thought. Is it the training or the modus operandi of the system that has led to this sad state? Or is there a divine anomaly somewhere that doctors have lost sight of. The answers to healing is available in this universe. It is all left to the doctors to go and look for the answers.

There seems to be blatant disregard for ethics. Advertising seems to be rampant though however hidden it may appear. Lighted neon lights are being flashed around at the place of business. Many doctors are found to be rude, arrogant, and dishonest with their diagnoses. The dishonest diagnosis is meant to scare the patient into accepting the expensive treatment. This is not a myth or fault finding but is a real happening in the market.

Doctors’ behaviour towards patients can be a rude awakening for patients. They shout, scold and threaten as if the patient can be subject to bullying at his whims and fancies.

I have personally seen and witnessed doctors being rude, disrespectful and even threatening to patients in the presence of their spouses and children. This cannot and should not be condoned.

I have seen doctors even quoting their fees to patients based on whether he/she wants a second-hand Proton or a Mercedes Benz. I have seen doctors who despise other doctors with no care for their reputation or welfare. Everyone else is wrong except himself.

The extent to which professional jealousy exists is frightening. If one doctor begins to do well in practice out of sheer dedication and hard work, then the others in the same profession would do everything to cause him/her harm. This indeed is despicable.

Are doctors waiting for the day when patients will begin to lose their patience and bring in gangsters into clinics and beat up doctors before the other patients. Please do not wait till that sad day.

Remember, the people are becoming wiser and more knowledgeable day by day due to technology. Or are they lost in their own time wrap? Time to wake up.

These days it is common for one doctor to derecognise another doctor when he/she comes for treatment. They charge fees as they like. Of course there is nothing wrong with charging a decent fee to cover costs, no sane person would deny a doctor this.

But it is the blatant mercenary attitude that I condemn. There have even been instances when a colleague has been “detained” in the clinic/hospital till the full fees have been brought by family members. How low and despicable is this.

Today, private hospitals have become a business enterprise and that is why so many businessmen have started investing in them. It costs almost half a million ringgit to become a doctor today and there one must make his or her first million in the first year of work. This seems to be the prime motivation of every medical graduate. This is shameful.

My honest suggestion is that every doctor should open their doors to cater to patients at least once a week and start healing the sick at no cost. If you can do this for the rest of your life then and only then will you realise what healing the sick really means and then you will begin to value the great and sacred virtues of the profession. Till then I offer my prayers for each one of you.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication. The Malaysian Insider does not endorse the view unless specified.

JAN 5 — A tax by any other name is still a tax. And that’s exactly what the 1 Care healthcare proposal is, if reports about the scheme are true.

Central to 1 Care is the National Health Financing Scheme (NHFS), a government insurance fund that both employees and businesses will have to pay 10 per cent of their monthly income to, similar to our Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF).

But unlike the EPF, it’s very likely we will not get our money back. So it’s basically a tax, plain and simple, however you try to dress it up.

I have no issues with progressive taxes, which is what the NHSF appears to be; those who can afford it will subsidise healthcare costs for those who can’t.

Given that only 10 per cent of the work force, or about one million, now pay for public goods enjoyed by all 28 million Malaysians via income tax, that seems par for the course.

But we already pay taxes, not only in the form of income tax but sin tax on booze and tobacco products, among others, to the government as payment for all public goods, including healthcare. Where’s the money going?

I don’t deny that healthcare costs may be spiralling upwards but it seems rich to propose a new levy on Malaysians when the government does not seem all that keen on tackling the leakages and illicit outflows, which are at an all-time high, by all independent accounts.

At the same time, Putrajaya seems bent on encouraging the poor dietary habits of the general population by increasing its sugar subsidy, which would only add to the burden on the healthcare system in years to come.

Malaysians already consume an average of 26 spoons of sugar daily and, as the Consumer Association of Penang (CAP) has pointed out, excessive consumption of the sweet stuff has been linked to over 60 diseases, from cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart problems, osteoporosis and kidney problems to asthma and allergies.

The prevalence of diabetes in Malaysia alone has jumped from below two per cent in 1960 to 14.9 per cent in 2006, or about 4.2 million patients. That’s 15 per cent of the total population, or almost one in seven persons.

CAP also pointed out that the federal government would save some RM567 million if it sells sugar at market price, due to lower healthcare costs in the long run, and I don’t doubt that they’re right in this case.

So if the government is sincere about preserving the health of Malaysians, it should get rid of the sugar subsidy, nix the 1 Care insurance scheme and find more efficient ways to employ the tax ringgit we have handed over to provide for fundamental public goods.

The very last thing it should be doing is double-taxing Malaysians just because it has failed to do its job properly.

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 1 — Public outrage is growing over a proposed “1 Care” scheme to restructure the country’s healthcare system that critics claim would force employees and businesses to contribute 10 per cent of their monthly income to a government-run insurance fund.

Although details of the scheme are still vague and Health Ministry officials have insisted it is still “too early” to sound warning bells, medical practitioners and consumer associations have banded together since last December to kick off the “Tak Nak 1 Care” campaign, hoping to shelve Putrajaya’s plans before they come into force.

Critics claim the scheme would force employees and businesses to contribute 10 per cent of their monthly income to a government-run insurance fund. — Reuters file pic
Calling themselves the “Citizens’ Healthcare Coalition” (CHC), the group have taken their cause online, using social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, blogs and YouTube to spread information about the scheme and gain wider public support.

Among others, the group have started a “#TakNak1Care” Facebook community page, a Twitter account using the handle @taknak1care and uploaded on YouTube, several video clips urging Malaysians to reject the scheme.

Their efforts appear to be gaining traction among netizens and have even caught the attention of Health deputy director-general (Medical) Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, who has been personally involved in lengthy discussions with the group via their Facebook page.

The Malaysian Insider understands that “1 Care” is modelled in its entirety after the United Kingdom’s National Healthcare Service (NHS), a publicly-funded healthcare system, and was mooted in the 10th Malaysia Plan for the Health Ministry’s 2011-2015 strategic plan.

It is believed that the five-phase scheme has already entered its third phase, and the full initiative, post engagement with doctors and pharmacists nationwide, is due to be presented to the Cabinet by March.

According to one CHC member, “1 Care” will replace Malaysia’s current two-tier (public and private) healthcare system by integrating both private and government hospitals, in hopes of ensuring more “equitable” healthcare for Malaysians across all socio-economic statuses.

Under the present two-tier system, Malaysians can choose to either seek treatment at private clinics or hospitals and pay out of their own pocket or via health insurance claims, or opt for treatment at government clinics or hospitals and pay only a nominal fee for basic, government-subsidised healthcare.

With “1 Care”, CHC said it would be made compulsory for all wage earners, excluding government servants and pensioners, and businesses to contribute 10 per cent of their monthly income to a government-run Social Healthcare Insurance (SHI).

“So those who can pay, will pay, while those exempted from paying, such as the poor and so on, would still qualify for free basic medical benefits offered under the scheme … Basically, those who can afford it will pay for those who can’t,” the member said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

But, apart from the “fee-before-service” system under “1 Care”, CHC is also griping over the limited healthcare benefits offered under the scheme such as: a patient is assigned to a specific general practitioner (GP); visits are limited to six times per year; visits are limited to one ailment per visit and GPs or primary healthcare providers (PHCPs) are given Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to meet and would be subjected to penalties.

“Under this system, PHCPs only profit by billing the SHI for their services. Like all insurance, the SHI won’t approve too many claims to minimise cost. PHCPs may be penalised for giving too much service … or referring too many patients to hospitals or specialists.

“1 Care” is believed to be modelled after the UK’s National Healthcare Service (NHS). — Reuters file pic
“Doctors may have to provide less healthcare to avoid penalty… but you don’t stop paying or pay any less to SHI,” the group claimed in one YouTube video.

The CHC member explained to The Malaysian Insider that “1 Care” budgets a maximum claim of RM360 per patient for each GP from the SHI, which amounts to only six consultations a year at RM60 each.

“And with the KPI quotas to meet, GPs would try to delay referring too many patients to hospital. Those who need to seek treatment urgently would then have to go to the hospital on their own and pay out of their own pocket,” the member complained.

When attempting to allay fears over “1 Care” recently, Dr Noor Hisham explained that the proposed scheme was merely at “conceptual stage” and that reconstruction of the country’s healthcare system was badly needed.

“Now in the public sector we spend RM16 billion and only recoup two per cent. On the other hand, we wouldn’t want to burden the rakyat so we are currently looking into various options and models.

“At this point of time nothing has been agreed upon. Until everything has been agreed to by the public and such, we need to study the cost analysis. However, there are already lots of assumptions and speculation and bad branding of the system like this ‘Tak Nak’.

“I wonder where they pluck the figures from without substantive data to support,” he wrote in one response.

But the CHC claims a new “1 Care Act” is due to be tabled in Parliament imminently, possible as early as the next sitting in March.

The CHC will brief reporters on the issue tomorrow in the build-up to the Selangor/Kuala Lumpur Healthcare Public Forum on February 12. The Malaysian Insider understands the forum will be opened by Selangor Mentri Besar Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim and attended by Health Ministry officials.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Medicine should be a tenure reward based profession so that professionals do not spend their time thinking about money and healing instead (i.e. free education, free housing, free food stamps etc..), and prices controlled by government so that doctors do not focus on becoming multimillionaires, though prices of education need to be lowered and spaces in the medical institution need to be increased. As of now medicine and education for is too expensive, too much hazing and abuse occurs in housemanship also government, and this contributes to the ‘payback’ mentality which is too prevalent.

To study medicine in dignity, people need to spend astronomical amounts overseas often at extreme cost to unhappy parents that may need to sell off family properties and pressure the student and young person needlessly, resukting in later bad behaviour from the now graduated doctor or if in the psychiatric or pharma establishment, intentional unecessary profiteering by prescribing expensive and unecessaery medications and treatments.

The local universities are abusive, the professors arrogant – even the receptionists and security guards snarky and status conscious due to the behaviour of their superiors (it trickles down), trainee doctors driven through entire periods of borderline insanity on the extreme hours in houseman shifts intentionally by the establishment WHILE bombarded by well rested political administrators/inculpators of certain mindsets that support the establishment thinking and sense of collusion – a corrupt culture if the government of the day is corrupt.

This is how a respectable institution like medicine becomes a tool of abuse and profiteering, and how the medical workers and doctors are wont to extract a pound of flesh at every turn, their rise to status of professional comes at tremendous personal psychological cost compounded by pressure by vicious bouts of housmanship, government harrassment and in some cases a general dislike for closeness to people but a desire to get the ‘Dr.’ in front of their name.

Most doctors (actually even other degree disciplines) are not interested in their field (this is intentional IMHO, people slated for exceptional careers must be interested in their field and this is ONLY afforded by selective political or in power persons children being placed there who do have interest while everyone else gets a seat for a degree they have no interest in to make their career mediocre, the politically unaffiliated or non-earmarked are only able to earn a living, not excel and compete on an even playing field, those who can afford to go overseas to take a degree they want may face the problem of selective offers in jobs vacancies and hiring in collusion with industry people . . . again reserved for certain cliques etc. so do not spend on education as if it will change anything in your child’s life . . .

If you are not politically favoured locally especially in the 3rd world, preserve those properties and focus on other debt free earning methods . . . ) or even emotionally suitable to dispense healing, the typical ‘doctors’ are into prestige and greed egged on by family pressure, in some cases brand obsessed wives and education of children in ever increasingly expensive schools and university funds (education should be free, as medicine should be free)- and this is reflected in unhappiness, manipulative behaviour and collusion with government described the above articles. When you step into a medical institution run by or staffed in the above described cases, you are walking into a pit of vipers, not a place of healing. Don’t get ill or try to recover on your own by keeping healthy eating well (again careful of WHERE you eat or go, collusion between unhealthy eateries/franchises and medical establishment is not impossible or unknown, the conscience and ethics upon the heads of the service providers derermined by the economy . . . ), exercising and keeping away from negative people . . .

Decision comes amidst massive Russian military modernization while US faces upwards of $1 trillion in cuts U.S. SM-3 by Matt Lacy –

Coming on the heels of massive troop drawdowns and massive cuts to the U.S. military, the Obama administration is planning on sharing U.S. missile secrets with the Russians. The military could face cuts of close to $1 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years. Currently the Pentagon is expected to cut $490 billion over the next 10 years, however another $500 billion in cuts could come because of the congressional deal reached last year during the debt ceiling debate.

As part of the cuts, for the first time since World War II, the U.S. will not have the ability to fight on two fronts at the same time. Colorado Congressman Mike Coffman has said he wants the two war posture kept and believes it can be done even with the defense cuts. Coffman is a Marine Corps combat veteran who served in Iraq.

“I’m all for making cuts so long as they don’t compromise our national security. I’m afraid from what I’ve seen so far of the direction that the Obama administration wants to go, it does just that by signaling to our adversaries that we are incapable of simultaneously fighting two conflicts at the same time.”

On top of the cuts, president Obama has signaled Congress that he is considering sharing U.S. missile defense secrets with the Russians.

During the signing of the controversial Defense Authorization bill into law, Obama issued a signing statement indicating that he felt restrictions aimed at protecting top-secret data on the U.S. Standard Missile-3 could impede his foreign policy authority.

The Washington times reported several weeks ago that U.S. officials were planning to provide Moscow with the data from the SM-3. The SM-3 is part of America’s missile defense program that was begun under President Ronald Reagan.

Reagan’s program was ridiculed in the press who called it Star Wars. The plan called for America to develop a missile shield to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles.

The Star Wars program has been credited as the beginning of the end of the Cold War as Moscow realized they could not keep up with American know-how.

Security officials have expressed concern that the technical data provided to the Russians could compromise the system’s effectiveness and allow Russian technicians to counter the missile. The SM-3 is considered to be some of the most highly effective missile interceptors in the U.S. inventory.

The proposal to share our top secret technology while we are facing upwards of $1 trillion in defense cuts comes at a time when the Russians are doing the exact opposite.

DefenseTech has revealed that Russia is currently in the process of a 10 year, $640 billion military modernization.

The modernization will include 600 new aircraft, 1000 new choppers and an additional 100 vessels added to the Russian Navy including 20 submarines.

Section 1227 of the Defense Authorization bill prohibits spending any funds that will be used to give Russian leaders access to our top-secret missile defense technology as part of any agreement until Congress is sent a report identifying the secrets to be shared, steps to protect the data from being compromised and how the secrets will be used.

Additionally, the president must certify to Congress that the technology will not be shared by the Russians to any other countries.

During the signing ceremony, Obama indicated he did not feel bound by the requirements of section 1227, saying while he intends to keep Congress informed, he also intends to implement the section “in a manner that does not interfere with the president’s constitutional authority to conduct foreign affairs and avoids the undue disclosure of sensitive diplomatic communications.”

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Pre-emptive appeasement. In case an Iran-USA war flares up, Russia has it’s word of honour to lose as well if it hits the USA. National pride in the eyes of all winners and survivors will have a bitter taste if the USA fell only because Russia broke it’s word by striking when they were fighting. With this tech transfer, Russia probably has promised not to attack USA if Iran is attacked. Don’t worry the WH is on the problem, no Mad Max, Waterworld scenario yet, though that BP and Corexit spill along with Fukushima type radiation could lead to ‘Predator (1987 John McTiernan) Mandibled’ Whales and gills on horny ‘Mutos’.

Once upon a time, cheating was something only pupils did. They would secretly take notes into their exams, copy each other’s homework and get a little too much help from their parents while doing their coursework. But over the last twenty years, cheating has spread. Now the teachers cheat too. In fact, I would argue that so much “cheating” goes on that the teachers themselves don’t even realize they’re doing it. Kingsdale School in Southwark has been fingered by whistleblowers who say that teachers unfairly helped pupils with GCSE and AS-level exams and coursework. The school has been rated “outstanding” by Ofsted and David Cameron said it was “brilliant”. Certainly the word on the street is that Kingsdale is an excellent school. It was once a place where security guards with dogs roamed, but the Head, Steve Morrison, turned the place around. Parents are keen to get their children into the school and children are proud to go there. Whistleblowers say that marks for non-existent coursework were sent to the exam boards. The coursework system works like this:

i) teacher collects in the work and marks it

ii) teachers in the department moderate the coursework by sample marking the work of others

iii) all marks are sent to the board

iv) the board asks to see a sample of the coursework, and if the marks on these few pieces are accurate, all of the teachers’ marks are approved.

It is a good system. While it respects the teacher enough to trust him to submit proper marks and to have followed the rules, it is able to ensure that teachers who are not skilled at marking accurately get the required support. But without the certainty of teachers’ professionalism, the system falls apart. One can see how a teacher, under pressure to get in all of his coursework, with kids who are lazy and refuse to do it, simply makes up a mark that he thinks the kid is likely to get and then submits it, with the intention of getting the coursework from the child at a later date. Kingsdale is also accused of allowing pupils to correct their exam papers after the exam had finished. It is also alleged that pupils who were late to their exams were not quarantined and were in fact allowed to sit the exams after other pupils had finished. Apparently, teachers would go to a pupil’s home if they did not turn up for an exam and would let them sit the exam there instead of at school. Who knows how much of this is true. But it is clear that teachers all over the nation are under so much pressure to produce results that a culture of cheating has taken hold of our schools. I have known countless teachers go to great lengths to “help” pupils with their work.

The problem always lies in knowing where the line should be drawn. I remember once taking a boy into my office, sitting him down with a pen and paper, demanding he write something for his coursework, knowing that by just forcing a few lines out of him, his chances of a C would be possible, but without those lines a C was out of our grasp. When he begged me to tell him what to say, I refused. I could easily have hinted at what he should say. But I didn’t. I wasn’t about to “cheat”. But did I? Once upon a time, quite simply, the deadline would have been set, he would have missed it, and he would have failed. That experience would have taught him that in life, without effort, one fails. And the next time he may have behaved differently. As it is, that boy wrote some 6 or 7 lines and managed to get a few marks more than he would have done otherwise. In the end, he missed a C grade by one mark – just one.

And to this day, I blame myself for that miss: I always think to myself, if only I had insisted on 8 lines instead of 7, he would have got that C… That’s our system. The teacher is responsible for the grades and the teacher is judged by them. This leaves the pupil without any responsibility for himself, and it has our system in tatters, where teachers are actually sent on courses that tell them how to bend the rules of the exam board in order to maximise exam results. Children no longer take deadlines seriously, and “help” has come to mean something entirely different. It’s easy to point the finger at Kingsdale. But in doing so, we’re missing the bigger picture. (Katharine Birbalsingh is the teacher who exposed the failings of the comprehensive school system at the Conservative Party conference last year. Katharine has been teaching in inner London for over a decade and plans to set up a Free School in south London to help to serve underprivileged children. Her book, To Miss with Love, is out now.

Just one of the symptoms of collusion from the ‘Feminist Agenda’ of NWO control and, an unethical promoting a poisonous oestrogen drenched environment rather than the ethics exuded from a testosterone drenched natural one. Yang = Structure and Ethics, Yin = Filler and Flavour. If you reverse that or miss out either ingredient, all the results would be chaos. In general only societies that function without an agenda are the only ones that will evolve and grow. the rest will stagnate and fall apart – try USA and it’s Sudra caste/military/plutocrat dominated zeitgeist. No future and no wonder, it’s Nero and his violin while the ‘West’ or Capitalist nations burn.

ARTICLE 3

15 Examples That Show Many Americans Have Become So Desperate That They Will Do Just About Anything For Money

More Americans than ever are desperate for money and many of them will do just about anything to get it. The crumbling U.S. economy has pushed millions of ordinary Americans to the brink of utter desperation. When it comes time to choose between being able to survive or breaking the law, many people are choosing to break the law. These days it seems like Americans will do just about anything for money. All over the country, there are areas where just about anything that is not bolted down is being stolen. A lot of people have resorted to making money however they can – selling drugs, selling their bodies, shoplifting, invading homes, taking bribes, running credit card scams and even stealing from their own family members. You will have a hard time believing some of the things that you are about to read below. When people have their backs pushed up against the wall, often they find that they are willing to do things that they never imagined that they would do. Things are getting crazy out there on the streets of America, and as the economy continues to decline things are going to get a lot crazier.The following are 15 examples that show many Americans have become so desperate that they will do just about anything for money….

#1 In Utah, one unemployed 28 year old man is offering to be “human prey” for hunters for the bargain price of $10,000. For an additional $2,000, he will let people hunt him down while he is running around naked.

#2 The Huffington Post is reporting that there has been an epidemic of air conditioning thefts all over the United States….

Across the country, in states like Illinois, Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Florida, there have been reports of thieves stealing unsecured air conditioning units weighing as much as 125 pounds.

#3 In Corpus Christi, Texas thieves have actually been breaking into funeral homes in order to steal the embalming fluid.

#4 Even police officers are committing desperate acts these days. Just check out what one police officer in Chicago is charged with doing….

A Chicago Police officer stole $50,000 from his ailing elderly father to pay off his bills and gambling debts and unsuccessfully attempted to swipe his dad’s retirement savings by impersonating him

#5 Nothing is off limits to thieves these days. Criminals recently broke into a southwest Atlanta beauty supply store and took off with $30,000 in hair extensions.

#6 In another area of Atlanta, thieves have been breaking down walls and busting bathroom fixtures with sledgehammers in order to get their hands on copper, brass and steel….

Kids in two Atlanta communities won’t have their neighborhood pools to help beat the summer heat, at least for now. Thieves used what is believed to be sledge hammers to bust walls and break fixtures in bathrooms at Adams and South Bend parks to steal copper, brass and steel.

#7 One grandmother in Florida has been accused of trying to sell her newborn grandson for $75,000.

#8 In Antioch, California a total of approximately 300 power poles were recently knocked down by thieves and stripped of their copper wiring.

#9 In Minnesota recently, a mob of teen girls brutally pummeled a mother and her two daughters until they were black and blue. Apparently the mob of teen girls was enraged over a pair of missing sunglasses.

#10 In Asheville, North Carolina thieves recently took off with 4 metal tables and 16 metal chairs that were sitting outside a pizzeria.

#12 In Oregon, thieves recently broke into a Salvation Army community center and stole 3 large air conditioning units. Now all the people that come to that facility for help and for community programs this summer will be absolutely sweltering.

#13 In the Cleveland area, two young boys that had set up a lemonade stand were robbed in broad daylight. The crooks got away with approximately 12 dollars.

#14 In Oklahoma, thieves recently broke into a church and stole “arts and crafts supplies meant to help teach bible stories to children”.

#15 A 59 year old man from North Carolina named Richard James Verone was so desperate for money that he actually robbed a bank and got caught on purpose so that he could be put in prison and be given free health care.

One day Verone walked into an RBC Bank in North Carolina, handed a clerk a note demanding exactly one dollar and sat down and waited for the police to arrive and arrest him. Verone has a growth on his chest and two ruptured disks but he does not have any health insurance. He is hoping that in prison he will get the medical treatment that he needs.

As society continues to unravel, prison is going to look like an appealing option for more and more people. At least in prison you get fed, you have a roof over your head and they will take care of your medical needs. For a whole lot of Americans, that would be a major step up. Have you noticed that the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is starting to disappear? America is becoming a cold, cruel place and lawlessness is everywhere.

For ages, Americans have looked down on the crime and the depravity that goes on in other areas of the world. Well, now America has all of the crime and depravity it can handle and it is going to get a lot worse as millions of formerly middle class Americans descend into poverty. A regular commenter on my website who identifies himself as “El Pollo de Oro” recently described the kind of chaos that he believes is coming to the streets of America….

I live in Philadelphia, a city that used to have a ton of blue-collar manufacturing jobs as well as a great deal of white-collar employment, but the blue-collar manufacturing jobs have disappeared–and on the white-collar side, a college degree isn’t necessarily the ticket to prosperity it once was. Philly has its share of nasty, dangerous ghetto areas as well as ritzy, upscale areas like Rittenhouse Square. But then, there are parts of Mexico City that look like Beverly Hills except that the signs are en español. A minority of Chilangos are filthy rich, which is what you expect in a Third World country: an uber-rich minority and a poor majority. And when The Banana Republic of America (formerly the USA) signed on for globalism and ignored Ross Perot’s warning, it opted to become a Third World country—which means that you can kiss the American middle class goodbye.

But there will be some growth industries in The Banana Republic of America: kidnapping, drug smuggling, murder for hire, carjacking, armed robbery. And if you want a taste of what life will be like in American cities in the future, just spend a few weeks in Guatemala City, Johannesburg or Caracas—all of which have the type of horrible crime rates that BRA cities can look forward to in the future. Desperate people do desperate things, and hardcore desperation will be in the norm in the BRA. It won’t be fun (unless, of course, being robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight is one’s idea of a good time).

Welcome to life in a rotting, decaying Third World hellhole. Welcome to the collapse of the Roman Empire. Welcome to life in The Banana Republic of America, formerly the USA. America is changing. The safe, secure environment that we all used to take for granted is dying. The number of truly desperate people rises by the day, and many of those desperate people are willing to do just about anything for money. The United States used to have a thriving middle class, but our economic system has been so manipulated over the decades that now almost all of the economic rewards go to the very top of the food chain. 25 years ago, the wealthiest 12 percent of all Americans controlled 33 percent of all the wealth. Today, the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans control 40 percent of all the wealth. In the United States today, we are actually witnessing the death of the middle class. Our jobs have been shipped overseas, the banks have enslaved us to debt, the government keeps finding more ways to tax us and the Federal Reserve keeps debasing our currency. Everywhere you go, despair is in the air. According to a brand new Reuters/Ipsos poll, 63 percent of Americans believe that the nation is on the wrong track. Fortunately, many Americans are responding to these signs of trouble by preparing.

One local Oklahoma newspaper recently did an article that profiled a few of the growing number of Americans that are preparing for hard times….

Rod and Lauretta Smith estimate they could survive a year without going to the grocery store. A large garden on their 5-acre property in south Tulsa produces hundreds of quarts of canned and frozen beans, tomatoes and other vegetables. Chickens provide eggs. The Smiths are among a small but growing number of people stocking up on food to become more self-reliant in a time marked by natural disasters and economic uncertainty.

The truth is that all of us should try to become less dependent on the system. The Democrats, the Republicans, the Federal Reserve and the big corporations are not there to help you. They are not going to come riding to the rescue if you lose your job and your home.

We all need to do what we can to become more independent and to prepare ourselves and our families for the incredibly difficult economic times that are inevitably coming. Those that have faith that their jobs will always be there or that the government will always take care of them will be deeply disappointed.

The system is dying and society is coming apart.

The only rational thing to do is to prepare for what is coming.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Here’s a solution that will not need a single cent.

Offer each person on food stamps or ‘council housing’ (not working or homeless), land for subsistence farming and make them live in a tent. Very Soviet era-esque, but when American citizens begin herding their own animals, composting rather than buying fertilisers, burning firewood rather than using electrical heaters and begin growing their own food, collecting rainwater/digging wells, weaving cloth for making their own clothes from home grown cotton, ALL FOR FREE, USA will finally be rid of the debt caused by sequestration of land by the state and dependence on food stamps or funding of state funded homeless shelters (See below link on this group as well for homelessness solutions . . . ).

As for education. Education does not need a millions worth elementary school, 10s millions worth high school, 10s billions worth University, do it like they did in the past – in a Warehouse-Barn and do not allow ‘Professor’ to charge exhorbitant fees (i.e. no more than allows him to retire in comfort or with some dignity, not extreme wealth) simply because he groups up with other Professor’s and calls a bunch of buildings a University.

Ditch those cars and vehicles, use draft animals which can also be eaten. Or use bicycles as in China, with ‘sidecar’ attachments if carrying goods. No more spending on fuel. You want to get there, you jolly well PEDDLE with your own legs (than charge fuel costs to the taxpayer if you’re in government).

The other thing of course would be to END ALL EXPENSIVE WARS and shut down all WMD silos of any and every type. How much does a silo or nuke cost to maintain yearly? How many nukes does USA have that it may NEVER use? All just to enrich military contractors.

Whos up for life in 1800s America? Better than post millenial decay as we see now for certain while USA indulges in wars without end.

For everyone else with some assets, liquidate EVERYTHING excess you have in fiat for precious metals, buy land to cultivate your own food, do not fuel ANY ‘Suit or Electricity using Industries’ and live like a Hillbilly. Grow biofuel crops for your electricity, grow your own cotton, get the wife to learn to use the loom, dump the car for a donkey or bullock and cart (no more road tax!), live in a Yurt made from your own skinned domestic animals instead of paying for construction, make your own beer, wine and yoghurt. Burn dung and firewood for warmth.

If enough people do all of this,the ‘duopolist bilderberg stooge potus’ and government itself is finished. We will be out own militia, so army guys don’t worry about invasions, but do distribute those weapons. Ordinary folk should buy some gunz and bibles (or whatever religious text or kama sutra . . .).

And finally remember to vote ONLY for the POOREST candidate on the list. In the event every candidate is rich, then it is your duty to run for candidacy as a non-plutocrat.

Students from a school in Bandar Sri Damansara, Selangor who will be sitting for the SPM (Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia) examination, which starts tomorrow, have been without their textbooks for over two weeks. The students were required to return their textbooks a fortnight ago as the school authorities had claimed that the teachers would be too busy during the exam to ensure the return of the books. As a parent, I am upset with the school for demanding the return of the books as surely students would need to revise and look up facts for a major public exam like the SPM. The reason given for the return of the textbooks was, to say the least, unreasonable and self-centred.

Obviously, the schools want to get back the books early so that there will be less paperwork. Teachers find this procedure convenient for them. Now my son has to surf the Internet for vital information as he cannot consult his textbooks which to him and fellow students are badly needed either for reference or revision. Is the measure taken merely for the convenience of schools at a time when teachers are in the holiday mood? Is it a policy made by schools or is it a directive from the Education Ministry? All told, it is a silly, irrational step.

One does not have to be a genius to determine that textbooks can be returned a few days before the school holiday starts or during the week of the exam. Why can’t this be done in the interests of students and not for the convenience of schools or the Ministry which will probably want to know the status of the returned textbooks? We keep talking about Vision 2020, but we do not seem to have the mentality to move forward. The Education Ministry seems to be making decisions without reflecting over the consequences. – Kenny

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

This case is quite similar to the below : 2 Articles On Possible Mass Attempts on Theft of Soul/Spirit (late May 2011)

Here is how soul theft works *IF* this was an attempt. The taking back of the textbook attempts to steal the Chakra of Mind which considers the textbook as part of itself. This chakra of the student follows the textbook and gets STOLEN by the Ministry of Education then given to mediocre students of ‘a certain race’. That is why you have students of a tender or at least fairly young age committing suicide out of the soul loss, the soul has followed the original textbook and since mentally the child understands that their future depends on education and by extension the textbook – when the texbook is traken away their soul is also taken with the textbook, or in Foxconn’s case workers who are purposely overworked that their soul becomes tied up in the machinery at the factory and becomes so fearful the physical form is sacrificed so that the soul can escape. If not simply neurotech actions from satellite cell tech ordering the suicides of course.

The stronger ones return to the original owners on their own to their owners, the weaker ones do not. In extreme cases, death can result. Buy your own textbooks or photostat the textbook they give you and study from that photostated version instead. End of story and note that the powers used here are not of Islam but the older Malay Animism, which should be revered for holy purposes instead of being used to deprive others of their future via taking their Mind Chakra (concentration).

The alternative version is that neurotech will be used under cover of false flag spiritualism. Take your pick but photostatting the textbook and exclusively using that photostat version (entirely leaving the ‘original’ textbook alone), is the best way to avoid the nuisance actions in all instances. Meanwhile do remember to vote for candidates that believe in :

1) Freedom from Apartheid/Fascism

2) Freedom from Religious-Persecution/Religious-Supremacy.

3) Equality for all ethnicities and faiths in all aspects of policy, Law and Constitution.